it was here that the crews and the merchandise arriving to Venice from possibly infected ports where kept for safety and disinfection.

Still today, we’ll be able to see the structure of the ‘mini-apartments’, endowed with kitchen, bedroom and a fireplace where people had to spend the quarantine, also known as ‘contumacia’. The guards of the Health Magistracy would prevent ‘guests’ to run away and would prohibit any contact with the world outside. You’ll hear about the period of quarantine described by Francesco Sansovino, a VIP and a writer.

Almost intact and still preserving a large number of inscriptions and items dating back to the XVI and XVII centuries is the enormous brick and wood structure called ‘Tezon Grando’, the warehouse where the goods descending from the ships and presumably infectious where orderly stocked and accurately disinfected.

The walls of the Tezon Grando are a lively and fascinating document of the life of people that worked here: superstitious inscriptions surrounded by a wolf-teeth decoration, intricate love-knots, commercial logos, boats and ships bring us back to the days in which the quarantine island burst with activity and voices.

We’ll be also able to vision a short documentary movie giving us a more complete insight of the vicissitudes of the Lazzaretto Nuovo through the course of history. From the years in which it was instituted, to when, in the XIX c.  it was transformed into a military base, until our present days, when it was into an extremely interesting witness of the never ending struggle of mankind against the plague and other pandemics.

While we wait for the vaporetto to bring us back to Venice we have time for a walk around the verdant quarantine island, dotted with other historical buildings and embraced by the soothing and peaceful waterscape of the Lagoon. When in Venice you might like to proceed with our Plague in Venice tour.