PLAGUE AND THE URBAN RESILIENCE OF VENICE
ANDREA BUBENIK
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century Venice experienced multiple outbreaks of the plague. The urban fabric of Venice, the city that gave us the word and concept of quarantine, is still marked by this history. Venice’s historical archives are a rich trove of thinking on disease management, including social distancing and the use of outlying islands for isolation practices. In addition to these carefully maintained civic records, there is much to discern from visual culture contemporaneous with plagues (Bailey 2005, Lynteris 2021). Artists such as Titian and Tintoretto, firmly embedded within daily Venetian life, responded to the plague in their own ways, often in paintings that emphasize the haptic, the sensory experience most often denied in times of disease.
It has long been understood that densely populated cities and urban centres are primed for the transmission of disease. In 1500 Venice was one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. When Jacopo de Barbari made his famous birds’ eye view map (fig.1), Venice was a superlative maritime power as well as an international cultural and mercantile destination. The city’s empire included a web of fortified harbors in the eastern Mediterranean and along the Dalmatian coast, from Crete to Cyprus, a vast network of trade.
Because Venice was such a vibrant commercial hub, the plague could arrive and enter often via mercantile ships. The city’s dense architecture, tight quarters, consistent humidity, and network of canals also meant that plague could fester and spread quite easily. The plague first arrived in Venice in 1348 and was documented twenty-two more times between 1361 and 1529; later in in 1576, most severely in 1630, and again in 1680. The death tolls remain staggering. In 1576 more than 50,000 died, almost a third of the population. In 1630 between September and December, more than 20,000, followed by circa 10,000 between January and August, with estimates of over 40,000 deaths over three more years (Chambers and Pullan 1992; Lazzari et.al. 2020).
What can we learn from this city in which pandemics were such a regular occurrence and struck with such ferocity? Apart from understanding how Venice’s unique urban fabric facilitated transmission and repeated occurrences of the plague, it is the magnitude of government response and attempts to control outbreaks that remain noteworthy. The Venetian records are demonstrative of a strong civic interest in public health. In 1348 Venice’s government council struck a committee on public health, which continued until 1490 when the definitive Provveditori alla sanità (‘Healthcare providers’) was established, with the specific goal of preventing the spread of disease (Palmer 1978). There is also the notable history of the pizzigamorti (body cleaners) who were employed to clear the dead from the streets from 1432 onward (Cranshaw 2011, 572).
The efforts of the Venetian government to control the plague are perhaps best understood through the outlying Venetian islands known as Lazaretti (singular Lazaretto), which were established to steer the sick and potentially infected away from Venice proper (Cranshaw 2012, 2011, 2008). Lazaretto Vecchio and Lazaretto Nuovo remain amongst the most ambitious attempts by any government to curtail the spread of disease. We can see an early mapping of these islands in the so-called ‘Book of Islands’ (Isolario), published in 1528 by the cartographer Benedetto Bordone (1460-1531). The map of Venice (Vinegia) provides an excellent perspective of the lagoon and surrounding islands, including Lazaretto Vecchio and Lazaretto Nuovo (fig.2).
As part of the Venetian government’s solution for the plague, the Lazaretto Vecchio was the site of Venice’s first plague hospital, a fully state funded treatment facility built in 1423. A report about the hospital during the 1576 plague was penned by a Venetian notary named Rocco Benedetti and published in 1630. Benedetti describes the deplorable conditions encountered:
I can truly say that on the one hand the Lazaretto Vecchio seemed like hell itself. From every side there came foul odours, indeed a stench that no one could endure; groans and sighs were heard without ceasing; and at all hours clouds of smoke from the burning of corpses were seen to rise far into the air… at the height of that great influx of people there were three or four of them to a bed… many were driven to a frenzy by the disease… (Chambers and Pullan 2015, 116).
The Lazaretto Nuovo, established in 1468, is where quarantine and social distancing were practiced. Incoming merchants, immigrants and visitors stayed there with their cargo for forty days, a preventative practice that the Venetians learned from another Adriatic port city, Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik (Tomic 2015). The term quarantino was adopted, a duration that was likely in part a symbolic reference to the biblical flood that lasted 40 days, or Christ who fasted for 40 days in the wilderness (Cranshaw 2012). The Lazaretto Nuovo was specifically established with the understanding that while new arrivals didn’t necessarily show signs of plague immediately, it could manifest later.
In this was, the Lazaretti were a line of defence for the health of the city, a way of managing incoming traffic, with the sick on one island, asymptomatic on another, healing and preventative measures to curb the plague as it struck again and again. Moreover, government policies also show consideration of community transmission, contaminated surfaces, and concern for health care workers. From a 1541 health order by the Provveditori alla sanità:
The sick or dead must immediately be sent to the Lazaretto Vecchio with all their goods from their rooms, and then all healthy persons who have nursed them must be sent with their goods to the Lazaretto Nuovo. Concerning doctors and barbers, the rule shall be followed as above (Chambers and Pullan 2012, 116).
The same health order includes the concept of social distancing, punishments for those who transgressed these laws:
When newcomers are sent to the Lazaretto, they are not to mingle with those that are already there, but each shall serve his time separately. And the Prior must act responsibly and diligently in this matter, with all those punishments which can be given at the discretion of the Provedditori di sanita. (Chambers and Pullan 2021, 117)
Also noteworthy are the complaints about the cost to government. In the report by Benedetti about the 1576 plague cited above, he comments as follows:
In maintaining so many people and bearing such an expense, the Doge spent a huge sum of money. Administration became chaotic, so that all the Savi [the cabinet] were bewildered, not seeing how to provide for so great a need, nor which course to take to prevent us from such a hail of arrows, showered in all directions by the plague (Chambers and Pullan, 117).
In early modern Venice, the plague was a regular and even anticipated occurrence. It was routinely expected that between 30 to 50 percent of a city’s population would die during a plague outbreak. The government arsenal to combat its spread included quarantine, social distancing, attempts to protect healthcare workers, and health legislation. The parallels to life during the COVID-19 pandemic are eerie.
References:
Bailey, Gauvin A, Sheila Barker, and Worcester Art Museum. Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500-1800. Worcester Art Museum: Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Chambers, David and Brian Pullan (eds.) Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Cohn, Jr., Samuel K. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Crawshaw, Jane L. Stevens. Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice. Burlington, VT.: Ashgate, 2012.
Cranshaw, Jane L. Stevens. “The Beasts of Burial: Pizzigamorti and Public Health for the Plague in Early Modern Venice”, Social History of Medicine 24/3 (2011): 570–587.
Lazzari, Gianrocco, Giovanni Colavizza, Fabio Bortoluzzi, Davide Drago, Andrea Erboso, Francesca Zugno, Frédéric Kaplan, and Marcel Salathé “A Digital Reconstruction of the 1630-1631 Large Plague Outbreak in Venice.” Nature: Scientific Reports 10, no. 1 (2020): 17849–17849.
Lynteris, Christos. “Painting the Plague, 1250–1630.” In Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times, 37–67. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2021.
Palmer, Richard John. The Control of Plague in Venice and Northern Italy 1348–1600. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1978.
Stevens, Jane L. The Lazaretti of Venice, Verona and Padua. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008.
Tomic, Zlata Blazina and Vesna Blazina. Expelling the Plague: The Health Office and the Implementation of Quarantine in Dubrovnik, 1377-1533. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
