The Ugly Mask

Everyone who had come to Venice for Carnival knew how different this sunny, romantic city of water became at night.

Dim lights, damp mist, and crowds wandering the streets in bizarre masks and brightly colored coats made it seem as if Venice had entered another world where ghosts and monsters roamed.

The canals and narrow streets made it especially charming, but they also turned it into a complicated maze filled with mysterious legends and inexplicable events.

The claim that kissing beneath the Bridge of Sighs would bring eternal love was merely a trick for tourists. In the Venetian locals' version, a prisoner saw his beloved with another man through a small window and died. His soul was bound to that bridge, and on certain special days, it would sigh.

I should never have fallen in love with her, much less thrown away my life for her. He regretted it terribly.

Yet he had killed himself, and the soul of a suicide could not find peace. So he had sighed on that bridge for a thousand years.

Venice had many churches, but one of them had not been built for believers.

Besides portraits, people also liked to use sculptures to preserve their likenesses. There had once been a beautiful and vain woman who lived for her appearance. She commissioned a sculptor to carve a statue of her.

Unable to bear the sight of her aging face, she decided to kill herself while she was still at her most beautiful. Others said she had died of shock. The maid who found her body said there had been a look of terror on her face, and she had been standing before that statue.

The house was later left uninhabited. The priests tore it down and built a church on the site, protecting the