Colobro looks like another rural town in Italy, but the residents of the area are afraid to even speak its name. It all started with one chandelier that fell in the middle of a council meeting.

• From the top it looks good // Photo: gettyimages

It all began in 1940, when Mayor Colobro Don Biaggio Virgilio shouted at a local council meeting that "if I lie, the chandelier on the ceiling will fall on us." Unfortunately, the chandelier fell in the middle of the yeshiva, and since then the residents of the picturesque rural town, which seems to have emerged from a postcard, believe that the city is cursed.

How cursed is Colobro? Well, the townspeople and the surrounding villages do not pronounce their name, as the magicians in the Harry Potter books do not pronounce the name of Lord Voldemort. Beyond that, a local resident told the British Mirror Journalist that "when I was working in a restaurant in a village near the rest of the staff, I moved away." As mentioned, since 1940, the local residents believe that their city is cursed. This helps in the fact that in Italian the name Colobro comes from the word colobro, which means snake or snakes.

The legend also tells of a witch sect that has lived in the city in the past, and may congregate in it even today, and who knew how to cast curses and sorcerers and remove them from the local residents. According to this legend, patients would come to these witches and they would apply water mixed with salt and charcoal to remove the curse from them. Then the water they would throw at some junction and the first person to pass through that junction would get the curse removed from the previous person.

From this it is already clear why the picturesque Italian town in the south of the country has become a place of pilgrimage for all lovers of mystery and fairy tales. Also, rumors were circulating about children with two hearts and three lungs born in it and so on.

And if you were wondering how do the people of Colobro continue to live in it? Well, the answer to that is simple - the curse only applies to those who visit the city for their first time, and not to anyone who lives there. It basically means that the residents, if they believe in the curse at all, are vaccinated from it and only make money on passing the story on to future generations.