THE FIRST PERMANENT LAZZARETTI
Quarantine, a word everyone is now familiar with because of the coronavirus pandemic, refers to a practice made systematic by the Republic of Venice half a millennium ago to keep the plague from infesting the city, using two islands that are now the object of an ambitious museum project.
When you can’t cure it, try to isolate it: for centuries the plague was one of the principal sources of death and destruction, along with war and famine. In the fifteenth century, Venice, a commercial port lying between East and West, understood the dynamics of its contagion, and instead of conforming to the prejudices and superstitions of the time, took a step forward worthy of its reputation as the capital of modernity. It contrasted “the disease” with pragmatism and foresight: “good health is the soul of trade” was the ‘Adriatic lesson’ that the Serenissima inculcated and imposed on the other powers of the time, who collaborated by creating a network of centers, norms and intelligence designed to gain control over the problem of epidemics.
“Italy served as a laboratory for understanding how infrastructure and the environment played a fundamental role in spreading contagious disease. Initially in Venice, where for the first time an “epidemiological” approach was applied. Thanks to the Lazzaretti, concepts and methods were developed that would later prove essential to controlling contagious diseases.” (Ilaria Capua, Salute circolare)
The efficacious Venetian governance and these two islands in the Laguna gave rise to words, practices and concepts like “lazzaretto” and “quarantine”, used internationally over the centuries and still current today. A story of exemplary value, whose origins reach back centuries before the Serenissima Repubblica and which outlast it by centuries more, whose cultural and environmental legacies are reunited in a single project, promoted since 2015 by the two associations - Ekos Club and Archeoclub di Venezia - responsible for the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.
“The Lazzaretto Nuovo is a symbolic place.” – declared Eric Bertherat of the WHO (World Health Organization) – “The Republic of Venice was the first to devise and implement a genuine public health plan to combat infectious diseases, despite the lack of scientific knowledge at the time. It played a prominent role, and it’s important that people come to see this place, to understand how absolutely innovative the security measures and the management system were.”