Venice, which for many centuries ruled over the Mediterranean, he created the lazarets . If quarantine still exists today, we owe it to the more empirical way in which the "Serene”, He faced the plague.
That terrible pandemic wiped out about a third of the European population, but the concrete reaction came from Italy. The Venetians were the first to react quickly, establishing in 1347 a magistracy with health duties. Then these became "Health supervisors". They hospitalized passengers from infected places.
Venice created the Lazzaretti
The sick were on the island of Santa Maria di Nazareth, called Nazarethum, therefore “Lazzaretto”. However, epidemics that have crippled humanity have existed since ancient times. Some, probably, had also been of bubonic plague, perhaps not particularly virulent. The Romans with the word "pestis" generically indicated every epidemic.
However, the bubonic plague was almost unknown and therefore the European population had not developed any antibodies when it arrived. It was a mouse that brought this disease. It was 1347, and that year the Genoese colony of Caffa, today's Feodosia, in Crimea, was besieged by the Tartars. The epidemic had come from Mongolia along the Silk Road and had already manifested itself among the besiegers. They thought it well to throw the plagued corpses inside the walls with catapults. Let's say they waged a kind of biological warfare. Rat fleas will then spread the disease.
Venice created the lazarets and taught Europe how to defend itself from the bubonic plague
The presence of the triad “bacterium, flea, rat” was inevitable to transmit the plague. One of those rats, then boarded a galley that sailed from Caffa, landing in Messina in 1347. The Sicilian port was a stop on the long routes that joined the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. In Messina, the rats coming ashore transmit the bacterium. In a few years Europe has been exterminated.
Italy is hit immediately, but Venice reacts quickly. Of course, we didn't know how or why we got sick. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, in fact, was only discovered in 1894. For four centuries, the only way to defend oneself was to isolate oneself, and "health belts" were born. As we said, a veritable maritime health police is launched in Venice, which obliges ships suspected of infection to follow strict rules. They must moor in the channels of Fisolo and Spignon, then between the mouth of Malamocco and Poveglia.
Juniper and rosemary
While individuals have already had to wait for a quarantine on the island of Nazarethum since 1403. It is very likely that this time period was chosen for the penance of Lent. Already in 1422, according to the chronicles, a hostel for sick pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had been transformed into a hospital. Venice provides the example and the others follow, as is happening today with the "Italian model".
In this regard, Pisa establishes a place of isolation in 1464 "out of town", however in front of the church of San Lazzaro. A few years later the maritime lazarets were born in Genoa. The Lazzaretti di terra are also established in Florence, and rotate in Milan. Venice, in 1468, alongside the Lazzaretto Vecchio, also the Lazzaretto Nuovo, where the warehouses were also created to house the goods suspected of having been struck by the disease.
Venetian masks
These goods are fumigated with juniper or rosemary. The tasks of the two Lazzaretti are split, so theis it becomes more sophisticated. The New is aimed at prevention, while the Old at the hospitalization of the sick. A curiosity is that the masks of the plague doctor, with the long nose filled with aromatic herbs, were born in that period. Today these masks conceived with a very long nose to stay away from the patient, they are carnivalesque. Of course they had no real therapeutic virtue. However, we do not know why, but that mixture of fragrant herbs was unwelcome to the rats and helped to keep them away from the doctors. As a result, the doctors did not suffer from the bites of the infected fleas. So, paradoxically, the "doctors of the plague" finally got sick with difficulty thanks to a Venice that created the lazarets!
# Italian in the heart
