Pedestrians strolling through the Welsh capital city of Cardiff may take a shortcut through the picturesque alley that passes between two green spaces and leads straight to Cardiff Market. However, if they look a little more closely, they’ll notice they’re walking amongst the dead.
The aptly named Dead Man’s Alley lies in front of St. John the Baptist’s church and cuts between its two graveyards. Along the alley, you’ll find metal numbers imprinted on the ground that indicate where bodies are buried in underground vaults. The church agreed to let the city create the alley as a shortcut to the market, but they had to pave over burial vaults to do so.
Golden Gai is a historic neighborhood in Tokyo made up of six alleys packed with the tiniest bars and restaurants in the world. Some are so small they can only fit around five people sitting elbow to elbow. This Shinjuku hotspot is what comes to mind for many when they think of Japan. Golden Gai, which means “golden block,” comes alive at night when its 200-plus establishments open for the night.
Jumping back to 1945, this part of Tokyo had a reputation for prostitution and black market trading after World War II. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the bars and restaurants became popular with local artists, writers, and intellectuals. It came to be called the bunkajin no matchi, or "the district of cultivated people.”
In the 1980s, the small business owners of Golden Gai came under threat of the Yakuza, who tried to intimidate them out of the area so they could sell the valuable land to real estate developers. The locals stayed strong and the historic neighborhood has remained more or less unchanged since the 1940s.
The ancient town of Veroli in Lazio, Italy, dates back to Roman times. If you wander the narrow cobbled streets, you may find yourself in the unassuming courtyard of the Casa Reali, or "Royal House," face to face with a fascinating piece of history. An ancient Roman calendar carved into a sheet of marble was found here in 1922 and was called the Fasti Verolani.
The marble slab was being used to seal a tomb when it was discovered, and its pieces were carefully reassembled by a local scholar. It was then placed on the wall of the Casa Reali for all to see. It includes the first three months of the year and is dated to approximately 14 BCE, based on the fact that the calendar makes reference to the death of the Roman Emperor Augustus. The spot has been called Fasti Verolani after the calendar. Pictured is a similar artifact discovered at the archaeological site of Amiternun in Abruzzo.
The UK is littered with oddly named streets, from Ingle Pingle in Loughborough to There And Back Again Lane in Bristol. The origin of London’s Needless Alley has been lost in time, but there are some theories as to how it earned this strange moniker.
It may simply have been named Needless Alley due to the fact that there were several needle-making businesses in the area. Another theory is that alleyways like this one were closed off in the 1700s to discourage criminal activities and squalor.
