It was here that the term “quarantine” was coined, after merchant ships arriving in the 15th-century Venetian Republic were moored for 40 days (“quaranta giorni” in Italian) to see if their crews were afflicted with the plague. It was here that the first isolated pestilence hospital was built on a solitary island in the lagoon, a precursor to today’s COVID-19 isolation wards. And it was in Venice that 16th-century doctors donned beak-nosed masks filled with aromatic herbs to cleanse the air they breathed when treating the sick — an attempt at self-protection that today is the favored choice for Venetian Carnival costumes.
Venice’s central place in the history of battling pandemics provides a relevant backdrop to this year’s Venice Film Festival, which opens Wednesday with the premiere of Pedro Almodovar’s in-competition film “Parallel Mothers.” Almodovar developed the project during Spain’s 2020 coronavirus lockdown, one of the harshest in the West.
In a pre-opening screening Tuesday, Italian director Andre Segre presents a short documentary shot last year showing how Venice organizers coped with COVID-19 to stage the first and only in-person international film festival during the first year of the outbreak.
The scenes in Segre’s film — shocking then, normal now — feature half-full theaters for Hollywood premieres, masked movie stars, cleaners in hazmat suits and the “blink, blink, blink” of remote thermometers taking temperatures at festival checkpoints.
Festival director Alberto Barbera said Tuesday he hopes the festival’s 2021 edition will mark the “reopening that was not the case last year.” But unlike the film festival in Cannes, which came back to life this year in France after skipping 2020, Venice still has to comply with stringent Italian anti-COVID restrictions.
A huge barricade once again is sealing off public access to the red carpet and there are limited chances for fans to catch VIP water taxi arrivals on the Lido. More than 10 testing stations have been set up, and festival-goers must show proof of a negative test, vaccination or having recently recovered from COVID-19 to enter screenings. Masks are required indoors.
In other words, the Venice show is going on — other premieres at the world’s oldest film festival include the debut of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in “Spencer” — even as Italy copes with new infections driven by the highly contagious delta variant.
For Venice, though, it’s really nothing new.
“The history of Venice is a history that teaches us how our city, first among European capitals, understood ahead of time how to manage viruses,” said Simone Venturini, Venice’s tourism chief. “These recurrences are studied and recalled even more today because the Venetian model is a model that paradoxically is still used.”
Beginning with the first confirmed plague to strike Venice — the 1348 outbreak that killed at least a third of its population — the city put in place containment measures even without understanding epidemiologically how it spread, said Fabio Zampieri, a history of medicine professor at the University of Padua Medical School.
Based on the belief that “bad air” was to blame for what became known as the Black Death, Venetian authorities closed churches and restaurants, canceled religious processions and ordered a thorough cleaning of homes and public venues, Zampieri said.
During the pestilence that erupted in 1423, Venice’s senate decided to lock down the whole city, prohibiting entry of people from suspected plague-ridden places and punishing locals who gave sick foreigners shelter with six months in jail, he said. A year later, Venice opened the first “lazzaretto,” a hospital on an isolated island in the Venetian lagoon dedicated exclusively to plague victims.
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