“Custodia gelosa — Zealous custodian” from the Gli abiti de veneziani (1754) by Giovanni Grevembroch, translated by René Seindal.
Full transcription of the Venetian text from the publication “Capitoli Da osservarsi nelli Lazaretti”, from 1674.
It is not easy to visit the many abandoned islands in the Venetian Lagoon, but it is possible. I’ve been to almost all of them.
The Venetian Lagoon is much more than just a watery area around the city of Venice. It is an integral part of Venice, its history and its origin.
This is an interactive map of most of the islands in the Venetian lagoon. Many islands are abandoned, or privately owned and inaccessible
Bad air was believed to be a major cause of sickness in the past, based on Aristotle’s idea of miasma as the cause of disease.
The Festa della Salute each year on November 21st is an important holiday in Venice. The event celebrates the end of the plague in 1631.
Venice has been described as a city on water without water – still there’s a well in every square and every courtyard
A chronology of the Lazzaretto Nuovo, the first permanent quarantine station for the bubonic plague in the world, founded in 1468 by the Republic of Venice.
The quarantine station on Lazzaretto Nuovo was for three centuries one of the main Venetian defences against the black plague.