Venezia, la Serenissima and bellissima Venezia.
For centuries queen of the seas, always battling for the crown with Genova, la Superba. Hub of cultures, trends, people and…diseases. Yes because, as all places with high people passage and presence, Venezia had an issue or two in her history with epidemics.
With all the intelligence you would expect from the most serene and powerful of queens, however, she managed not only to ease off a threatening health hazard, but also to teach how to do it to the rest of the world, in a way we still use today.
How? Simple: after understanding that only isolating the sick from the healthy could prevent contagious diseases from claiming lives, Venice invented the quarantine. Helped by the natural conformation of its territory, largely made up of small, accessible, but easily isolable islands, Venice was the first, as early as the 15th century, to designate a specific area to the containment and care of the contagious: it was the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Yes, “lazzaretto,” a name that, in Italian, means just that: the place where the contagious reside. Some time after, Lazzaretto Nuovo came.
Here’s their history.
The first of the two islands to appear on our radars is the Lazzaretto Vecchio. Located in Venice’s central lagoon, it is not far from the Lido and within the San Marco basin. It is likely that its favorable location — not far from the city, but safely separated from it — was the reason it was chosen, all the way back in 1423, to build a specialized hospital for the treatment and isolation of people with plague. At the time, the island was known as isola di Santa Maria di Nazareth, hence the rise in usage of the word Nazaretum first and, later, of Lazzaretto, the latter possibly result of some confusion with the name of a nearby island, that of San Lazzaro.
Up to 1468, the Lazzaretto Vecchio was the only “lazzaretto” in Venice. In that year, however, the island of Vigna Murada, situated further out in the lagoon, was to become the new “lazaretto,” used to quarantine people — more about it in a little while — and so, our 1423 Lazzaretto island became Lazzaretto Vecchio (old Lazzaretto island), as opposed to the 1468 Lazzaretto Nuovo (new Lazzaretto island).
Since the foundation of its hospital, Lazzaretto Vecchio developed greatly and remained an active part of Venetian life for centuries. Archaeological findings show the island was also used, in the 16th and 17th centuries as a burial ground for the many victims of the two Black Death epidemics that hit the city. In later years, Lazzaretto Vecchio became a place for quarantine just like Lazzaretto Nuovo and, in the mid-19th century, it was turned into a military deposit, with most of its medieval buildings being torn down.
Lazzaretto Vecchio laid in a state of neglect for good part of the 20th century, until extensive restoration works began in 2008, supported by the Ministry for Public Works and the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, with the aim of recovering all the structures and turning the island in part of the Museo Archeologico della Laguna di Venezia.
And what about the Lazzaretto Nuovo?
We said the island was transformed into Venice’s quarantine location in 1468: the city’s senators and medical experts, upon realizing that the isolation of potentially infected individuals was necessary to curb the spread of certain diseases, made it compulsory for all merchants and sailors coming to Venice to spend 40 days on the Lazzaretto Nuovo before entering the city. Whatever came from the sea, needed to be quarantined, too, so large buildings called teze were created: here, goods were treated with aromatic herbs’ fumes and sanitized. Juniper and rosemary were considered particularly efficient.
The main structure of the island, the Tezon Grande dated to the 16th century and measured more than 100 meters in length: it was, then, the largest building in Venice, second only to the Corderie dell’Arsenale. Its walls, covered with words, messages and drawings of the people who quarantined there, bear witness to the merchants, sailors, guardians, as well as soldiers and security staff, who populated the Lazzaretto Nuovo through the centuries. These old graffiti tell us also a lot about the many, amazing commercial connections of Venice during the Renaissance and the Baroque period, with mentions made to Constantinople, Alexandria of Egypt, Cyprus, Greece and many, many other places.
But the strategic location of the Lazzaretto Nuovo, from which entry to the lagoon could be easily controlled, made it also an important place from a military point of view: it is for this reason that its public health role was abandoned in the 18th century, when the island became a military garrison and deposit. Today, the Lazzaretto Nuovo is not only an important part of the history of Venice, but is also to become part of the already mentioned Museo Archeologico della Laguna di Venezia, once restoration works are over.
Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo:the symbol of Venice’s place in the history of public health, as Eric Bertherat, WHO representative and specialist in infectious diseases famously declared: “The Republic of Venice was the first to implement a real public health strategy to control infectious diseases, in spite of the overall lack of understanding of the problem in those times. It played an essential historic role and people should come visit Venice’s Lazzaretto islands, to fully understand the immense innovation they represented in the history of public health.” Ilaria Capua, virologist and director of the University of Florida’s One Health Center, echoed his words: “Italy was a bona fide laboratory, where it was finally understood how infrastructures and, in general, the environment, could have a fundamental role in the diffusion of illnesses. Venice was the first to implement what we could define today an epidemiological approach. In its lazzaretti, ideas and practices essential for the control of infectious diseases were developed.”
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