Rome

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Museo Storico Nazionale dell’Arte Sanitaria

A hostel and church was established here around 726 by King Ine of Wessex to cater for weary pilgrims from the north. Known as the burgus saxonum or in Sassia, this became the nucleus of the world’s first purpose-built hospital. British funds for the hostel were cut off with the Norman invasion of England in 1066, after which it passed into papal hands and thence to the Templar knight Guy de Montpellier, who founded the Order of the Holy Spirit. A few rooms of the modern hospital house a gruesome collection of medical artefacts. Two massive 15th-century frescoed wards were emptied not all that long ago of their beds to provide space for itinerant exhibitions.

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