The Woman Who Glowed At Night
Anna Monaro’s strange luminescence intrigued Guglielmo Marconi
It’s March 1934 and Anna Monaro, a patient at Pirano hospital in Italy (now on Slovenian territory) is sound asleep. Nothing seems out of the ordinary until a fellow patient sees an intense blue flame-like light emanating from her body, strong enough to light up the entire room.
Several nurses and a doctor witness the bizarre event, and Anna is transferred to a much larger hospital in Rome, where the perplexing phenomenon can be studied. The story of the “luminous woman” is too juicy to remain a secret for long: soon the account of Anna’s strange glow is all over Italian newspapers. The unusual tale is also picked up by the foreign press, appearing on German, Hungarian, and British publications, and even ending up on the New York Times.
It all starts on the night of March 8, 1934: Maria Gherardi, a woman lying sick in the small hospital of Pirano, Istria, is tossing and turning in her bed.
She can’t sleep and at some point, she can’t help but notice an intense light emanating from the bed next to hers: it doesn’t come from a bedside lamp or a flashlight, though: it seems to radiate directly from the sleeping body of her neighbor.
