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Pesthouse Imaginaries

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Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times

Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History ((MBSMH))

Abstract

This study considers some Italian lazarettos that were not situated in port cities, offering an environmental perspective on peri-urban spaces involved in urban plague control rather than customary contagionist views of plague. Pesthouses entailed high costs to communities, whether they rented and outfitted available suburban properties or instead undertook the massive expenditures to design and build great structures de novo. Were they worth the investments? Did pesthouses ‘work’ to constrain and contain plague mortality? While historical evidence cannot answer such questions definitively, this chapter argues that extramural confinement zones did not remove ongoing plague risks from cities and towns that used them, largely because plague was not and is not transmitted person-to-person. The built fabric of early modern plague management disappeared with urban expansion and infrastructure modernisation, such that little remained when plague’s ‘Third Pandemic’ unfolded. Yet the contagionist view of premodern plagues endures. We can now re-see former landscapes of plague, from above and underground.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G. P. Marchi, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’. In Francesco Pona, Il gran contagio di Verona nel milleseicento, e trenta, Photostatic edition, pp. vii-viii (Verona: Centro per la formazione professionale grafica, 1972 [1631]). Francesco Pellegrini provides lengthy quotes from the contemporary newspaper accounts in his ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, Studi Storici Veronesi 2, no. 2 (1949/50): 143–191.

  2. 2.

    M. V. Quattrina, ‘La peste. La guerra. L’abbandono’, with images of the crew and the camera drones used in filming: https://lazzarettovr.jimdo.com/documentario-sulla-peste-al-lazzaretto-di-verona/

  3. 3.

    See the blog of Alessandro Boggian, November 12, 2012, on the first public assembly held for saving the lazaretto: www.aleboggian.altervista.org/salviamo-il-lazzaretto-di-verona/. On work stop: L. Costantino, ‘Raccolta di fondi per salvare il Lazzaretto’, L’Arena (3 May 2016).

  4. 4.

    A. Braioni and A. Conforti Calcagni, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona, da luogo di sanità a luogo per la cultura della salute’. In Lazzaretti europei: Da luoghi di sanità a rete di rapporti internazionali, pp. 15–17 (Atti del Convegno, Venice, 2013). The authors argue that 18,000 cubic metres of concrete will destroy the ‘incantata belezza’ (enchanted beauty) of the location.

  5. 5.

    S. Duchêne, S. Y.W. Ho, et al. ‘The Recovery, Interpretation and Use of Ancient Pathogen Genomes’, Current Biology 30 (5 October 2020): R1215-R1231; M. A. Spyrou, K. I. Bos, et al. ‘Ancient Pathogen Genomics as an Emerging Tool for Infectious Disease Research’, Nature Reviews: Genetics 20 (2019): 323–340.

  6. 6.

    K. I. Bos, et al. ‘A Draft Genome of Yersinia pestis from Victims of the Black Death’, Nature 478 (2011): 506–510; S. Haensch, et al., ‘Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death’, PLoS Pathogens 6:10 (2010): e1001134; L. Little, ‘Plague Historians in Lab Coats’, Past and Present 213 (November 2011): 267–290; M. A. Spyrou, et al. ‘Historical Y. pestis Genomes Reveal the European Black Death as the Source of Ancient and Modern Plague Pandemics’, Cell Host & Microbe 19 (2016): 874–881.

  7. 7.

    T. Castro, ‘Aerial Views and Cinematism, 1898–1939’. In Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin (eds.), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, pp. 118–33 (London: IB Tauris, 2013), pp. 120–21.

  8. 8.

    J. Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 7–33.

  9. 9.

    R. Jorge, ed., Les Faunes régionales des rongeurs et des puces dans leurs rapports avec la peste: résultats de l’enquête de comité permanent de l’Office International d’Hygiène publique, 1924–1927 (Paris: Masson, 1928).

  10. 10.

    C. Dyer and R. Jones, Deserted Villages Revisited: Explorations in Local and Regional History v. 3 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010); R. Glasscock (ed.), Historic Landscapes of Britain from the Air (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 103–124.

  11. 11.

    Final Report, ‘Public Health Applications of Remote Sensing of the Environment (An Evaluation)’, Contract number NAS-9-11522, Manned Spacecraft Center, NASA, pp. 80–83, retrievable at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19730005342. A path-breaking survey of twentieth-century Soviet plague surveillance and control makes no specific mention of aerial photography assisting ground surveillance. See: S. D. Jones, et al., ‘Living with Plague: Lessons from the Soviet Union’s Antiplague System’, PNAS 116:19 (2019): 9155–9163.

  12. 12.

    For important new archaeological work on the impact of the Black Death in rural England see C. Lewis, ‘Disaster Recovery: New Archaeological Evidence for the Long-Term Impact of the ‘Calamitous’ Fourteenth Century’, Antiquity 90, no. 351 (2016): 777–797; S. Kacki, ‘Digging up the Victims of the Black Death: A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the Second Plague Pandemic’. In C. M Gerrard, P. Forlin, and P. J. Brown (eds.), Waiting for the End of the World? New Perspectives on Natural Disasters in Medieval Europe, pp. 232–247 (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).

  13. 13.

    M. Achtman, et al. ‘Microevolution and History of the Plague Bacillus, Yersinia pestis’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 101 (2004): 17837–17842; Little, ‘Plague Historians in Lab Coats’.

  14. 14.

    On the archaeogenomics related to the breakthrough study of London’s East Smithfield Black Death cemetery see: K. Bos, et al. ‘A Draft Genome’; Little, ‘Plague Historians in Lab Coats’; M. H. Green, ‘The Globalisations of Disease’. In N. Boivin, R. Crassard, and M.D. Petraglia (eds.), Human Dispersal and Species Movement: From Prehistory to the Present, pp. 494–520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  15. 15.

    Spyrou et al., ‘Historical Y. pestis Genomes’.

  16. 16.

    Two exceptions should be noted. J. L. Bolton, ‘Looking for Yersinia pestis: Scientists, Historians and the Black Death’. In L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe (eds.), Society in an Age of Plague, pp. 15–38. Fifteenth Century Studies, XII (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013); N. Varlık. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: the Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  17. 17.

    Camera drones have been commercially available only since the 2010s; see B. Rao, A. Goutham Gopi, and R. Maione, ‘The Societal Impact of Commercial Drones’, Technology in Society 45 (2016): 83–90. Such devices have become fundamental to the study of archaeological sites and landscapes: S. Campana, ‘Drones in Archaeology: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives’, Archaeological Prospection 24 (2017): 275–296. How they will affect consumer (and student) expectations for new and interactive ways of exploring past urban spaces and earlier human experience is not yet clear.

  18. 18.

    G. M. Varanini, ‘La carità del municipio: Gli ospedali veronesi nel Quattro e nel primo Cinquecento’. In A. Pastore, et al. (eds.), L’Ospedale e la città: cinquecento anni d’arte a Verona, pp. 14–41 (Verona: Cierre, 1996).

  19. 19.

    M. Knapton, ‘The Terraferma State’. In Eric Dursteler (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, pp. 85–108 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019).

  20. 20.

    See L. Camerlingo, ‘Il lazzaretto a San Pancrazio e l’ospedale della Misericordia in Bra: Le forme dell’architettura’. In L’Ospedale e la città, 179. On this era in Verona’s new approaches to charitable assistance with the Misericordia (in contrast to new approach to territorial state building) see: P. Lanaro, ‘Carità e assistenza, paura e segregazione: Le istituzioni ospedaliere veronesi nel Cinque e Seicento verso la specializzazione’. In A. Pastore, et al. (eds.), L’Ospedale e la città: cinquecento anni d’arte a Verona, pp. 43–55 (Verona: Cierre, 1996).

  21. 21.

    N.-E. Vanzan Marchini (ed.), Rotte mediterranee e baluardi di sanità: Venezia e i lazzaretti mediterranei (Venice: Skira, 2004); Camerlingo, ‘San Pancrazio’, pp. 182–183. In Padua, the old lazaretto was demolished in 1509; construction of the new one, situated on the left bank (Venice-facing) of the Brenta canal, did not begin until 1555, and was completed in 1576. See C. Ferrari, Il lazzaretto di Padova durante la peste del 1630–3 (Padua: Società Cooperativa, 1905).

  22. 22.

    A. Conforti Calcagni, Le Mura di Verona: La città e le sue difese dalla fondazione romana all’unità d’Italia (Verona: Cierre, 1999), pp. 82–83. Destruction of pre-existing walls and a suburban isolation hospital happened in nearly identical fashion at Brescia, during the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Venice’s Senate dictated that new lazarettos be built a distance of 1600 passi from the urban walls. See Pellegrini, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, p. 150; and on Brescia, see P. Guerrini, ‘Miscellanea Bresciana di studi, appunti e documenti con la bibliografia giubilare dell’autore (1903–1953). Memorie Storiche della Diocesi di Brescia 21 (1954): 97–98.

  23. 23.

    Camerlingo, ‘Il lazzaretto a San Pancrazio’, p. 179.

  24. 24.

    For details of the stages of the lazaretto’s construction and Sanmicheli’s involvement and designs, see Camerlingo, ‘Il lazzaretto a San Pancrazio’, pp. 183–188. Sanmicheli’s designs did not survive; on the interim structure and full description of the building of the structures that survived into the twentieth century see Marchi, ‘Introduction’, x-xiii; and P. Davies and D. Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli (Milan: Electa, 2004), pp. 114–121.

  25. 25.

    N. E. Vanzan Marchini, curator. Venice and the Mediterranean Lazarettos (Venice: Edizioni della Laguna, 2004), pp. 22–26.

  26. 26.

    Vanzan Marchini, ‘Introduction’. In Vanzan Marchini (ed.) Rotte mediterranee e baluardi di sanità: Venezia e i lazzaretti mediterranei, pp. 12–13 (Venice: Skira, 2004).

  27. 27.

    L. Beltrami, Il lazzaretto di Milano’ (1488–1882) (Milan: Umberto Allegretti, 1899); L. Patetta, ‘I temi nuovi dell’architettura Milanese del Quattrocento e il Lazzaretto’. Arte Lombarda, n.s. 79:4 (1986): 75–84.

  28. 28.

    Pellegrini, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, p. 157, believes that the initial planning committee would have solicited Fracastoro’s advice in 1539, though there is no firm evidence to the point. Fracastoro himself blamed Germans for an earlier plague in Verona: ‘We saw, in the year 1511, when Verona was in the hands of the Germans, plague break out, of which about ten thousand persons died. One coat made of skins caused the death of no fewer than twenty-five Teutons…’. See Fracastoro, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis et Eorum Curatione, Libri III, trans. and ed. W. C. Wright (New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1930), p. 239.

  29. 29.

    Officially the transfer of the leprosarium’s management to the Health Magistracy came in 1451, but the effective use of these resources was not ordered until 1576. At that point wooden isolation huts (called casotti) in the city were no longer acceptable; mandatory removal of some plague victims occurred at this point. See: Pellegrini, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, pp. 146–147. Thus, before the disastrous outcomes of the 1576 epidemic, it is also possible that many in Verona believed traditional, temporary isolation camps would serve well enough in a crisis.

  30. 30.

    Flooding in 1591 undermined the earlier structure: Camerlingo, ‘San Pancrazio’, p. 179. Pellegrini, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, pp. 151–153, and pp. 163–170, instead argues that official assessment of mortality during the 1575–76 plague was worse because recovering plague patients were housed too close to the city.

  31. 31.

    Though he said that it ‘horrifies the pen’ (inorridisce la penna) to write of tormented noble victims, Pona, Il gran contagio, p. 27, relished these details. Some were ‘amorously delirious’ others escaped guarded areas and threw themselves into the river, and some even beat their heads on stones, splattering brains, gushing blood: ‘Alcuni, rotte le custodie, con precipitoso corso, si lanciavano nel fiume; altri, con feroce moto, percuoteano del capo alle pietre; e con larga effusion di sangue seminavano le cervella’.

  32. 32.

    Pona , Il gran contagio, p. 32, where the author describes his resolution to despise the profits plague would bring him and preserve himself from danger ‘for the sake of the Patria’.

  33. 33.

    A. Tadino, Raguaglio dell’origine et giornali successi della gran peste contaiosa, venefica, & malefica seguita nella Città di Milano, & suo Ducato dell’anno 1629 sino all’anno 1632 (Milan, 1648), discussed in L. di Giammatteo and J. A. Mendelsohn, ‘Reporting for Action: Forms of Writing between Medicine and Polity in Milan, 1580–1650’. In J.A. Mendelsohn, A. Kinzelbach and R. Schilling (eds.) Civic Medicine: Physician, Polity and Pen in Early Modern Europe, pp. 152–156 (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

  34. 34.

    Pona, Il gran contagio, p. 26.

  35. 35.

    G. Alfani and M. Bonetti, ‘A Survival Analysis of the Last Great European Plagues: The Case of Nonantola (Northern Italy) in 1630’, Population Studies 73:1 (2019): 101–118.

  36. 36.

    Marchi, ‘Introduction’, xlii, repeating numbers that Pona supplied, Il gran contagio, pp. 60–61. On the demographic scale of this epidemic wave in Italy see: G. Alfani and T. E. Murphy, ‘Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World’, Journal of Economic History 77:1 (2017): 314–343. And still useful: L. Del Panta, Le epidemie nella storia demografica italiana (secoli xiv-xix) (Turin: Loescher, 1980), pp. 157–163.

  37. 37.

    Vanzan Marchini, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–13, and Camerlingo, ‘San Pancrazio’, pp. 182–184, discussing the lazaretto in the context of Venetian territorial state commercial policy. Milan’s more famous lazaretto was used as a jail, as soldiers’ quarters, as shops and businesses, as a Veterinary School, as a municipal workhouse for the poor, and as a festival site—see: Beltrami, ‘Il lazzaretto di Milano’, p. 56. Contemporary with Volckamer’s publication, in 1715 the lazaretto was used as a prophylactic quarantine site for part of the entourage of Maria Teresa Grandduchess of Tuscany and her consort Duke Lorenz; the duchess and duke instead performed quarantine in the sumptuous Villa Burri just across the river; see Pellegrini, ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, p. 177.

  38. 38.

    Lori Jones, ‘The Diseased Landscape: Medieval and Early Modern Plaguescapes’, Landscapes 17, no. 2 (2016): 108–123.

  39. 39.

    For example, Florence’s survey of living conditions in Florence, on the eve of the 1630 plague: J. Henderson, Florence under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 51–70.

  40. 40.

    The best and most detailed description of this deliberate approach to plague control is R. Cancila, ‘Salute pubblica e governo dell emergenza: la peste del 1575 a Palermo’, Mediterranea: Ricerche storiche 13, no. 37 (2016): 231–72. See esp. pp. 248–256: ‘The nine lazzaretti of Palermo’. Also very useful is Jane Stevens Crawshaw’s discussion of the evolution of Genoa and Ligurian confinement zones, though her primary interest is ‘quarantine hospitals’: J. Stevens Crawshaw, ‘The Places and Spaces of Early Modern Quarantine’. In Allison Bashford (ed.), Quarantine: Local & Global Histories, pp. 15–34 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  41. 41.

    J. Stevens Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012); J. Henderson, Florence under Siege, pp. 181–216.

  42. 42.

    Vanzan Marchini, ‘Introduction’, Venice and the Mediterranean Lazarettos.

  43. 43.

    A. Bashford, ‘Maritime Quarantine: Linking Old World and New World Histories’. In Bashford (ed.), Quarantine: Local & Global Histories, pp. 1–12 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); A. Chase Levinson, ‘Early Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean Quarantine as a European system’. In Bashford (ed), Quarantine: Local & Global Histories, pp. 35–53 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  44. 44.

    Stevens Crawshaw, Plague hospitals, pp. 53–54 and 88–91.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., pp. 67–70; Vanzan Marchini, ‘Venezia e l’invenzione del lazzaretto’. In Vanzan Marchini (ed.), Rotte mediterranee e baluardi di sanità: Venezia e i lazzaretti mediterranei, pp. 25–28 (Venice: Skira, 2004). Poveglia was in service from the 1790s as Venice’s a third island isolation area, called lazzaretto nuovissimo; see Vanzan Marchini, ‘Venezia’. In Vanzan Marchini (ed.), Rotte mediterranee e baluardi di sanità: Venezia e i lazzaretti mediterranei, pp. 201–202 (Venice: Skira, 2004).

  46. 46.

    I calculated the area from Pellegrini’s measurements: a rectangular space of 238.67 x 171.11 meters; ‘Il lazzaretto di Verona’, p. 158. The FAI consigned only three hectares to renovation: www.veronaeconomia.it/leggi-notizia/argomenti/economia-veronese/articolo/fai-fondo-ambiente-italiano-comune-di-verona-e-leccezionale-e-storica-zona-lazzaretto-da-dicemb.html

  47. 47.

    Pellegrini, ‘Il lazaretto di Verona’, pp. 161–170.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., pp. 164–170. At the time, Veronese would also have seen the Adige River as a plague consignment area, for when burial space and/or personnel grew scarce, the dead were consigned to the river; Pona, Il gran contagio, pp. 45–47.

  49. 49.

    Padua’s lazaretto had 300 patient cells, and in this respect was more capacious than Verona’s complex. It was authorised by Venice in the 1530s, building begun in 1555, and in use for the 1575–76 plague. Not as architecturally impressive as Verona’s structure, it was demolished in 1819, after long disuse. See V. Marzocca, La peste a Padova nel 1575–1576: cause e meccanismi di diffusione dell’epidemia, Università degli Studi di Padova, masters’ thesis in Scienze Statistiche, Academic Year 2017/2018, pp. 43–49.

  50. 50.

    R. Cancila, ‘Salute pubblica’.

  51. 51.

    A. Melchioni, ‘Il lazzaretto di Bergamo’. In Lazzaretti europei: Da luoghi di sanità a rete di rapporti internazionali. Atti del Convegno, Venice, Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo, 14 September 2013, (Venice: Archeoclub d’Italia, 2015), pp. 13–14. Stable url: www.archeomedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Lazzaretti-europei.pdf. The quote is from Melchioni’s description of the lazaretto zone: ‘immersa in aperta campagna’.

  52. 52.

    The English medieval equivalent was a ‘close’, describing field and forest belonging to a great lord, once the Bishop of Brescia, and farmed by unfree peasants, but by the mid-fifteenth century the commune claimed it as a civic lazaretto because it had been long abandoned. See: P. Guerrini, ‘S. Bartolomeo al Lazzaretto’, Memorie Storiche della Diocesi di Brescia 15, no. 1 (1948): 64–67. I have not been able to determine how many hectares the chiusura included.

  53. 53.

    Guerrini, ‘S. Bartolomeo’, pp. 66–67: the chaplain assigned to the lazaretto had duties beyond its supposedly closed perimeter: at Costalunga [a few hundred meters distant], and even at Casadesimo [today’s Chiesa della Stocchetta, 4.5 kilometres away]. And the houses proximate to, but outside, the lazaretto were considered infected (sporche), so the chaplain sent to the pesthouse was to minister to those persons as well as the plague stricken. An image of part of the remaining loggia can be found in A. Vaglia, ‘La peste del 1478 a Brescia dal diario di Giacomo Melga’, Le Infezioni in Medicina 2 (2011): 131.

  54. 54.

    Similar to the lugubrious evidence from Verona, partitioning spaces and categorising seems in retrospect a failed plague policy. Ninety percent of the Ghetto residents (numbering 721 before the plague) fell ill; 58.4 percent died. See S. Einbinder, ‘Poetry, Prose and Pestilence: Joseph Concio and Jewish Responses to the 1630 Italian Plague’. In Haviva Yishai (ed.), Shirat Dvorah: Essays in Honor of Dvorah Bregman, pp. 77–78 (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University and Mossad Bialik, 2018).

  55. 55.

    Henderson , Florence under Siege, pp. 195ff. Putting a lazaretto at San Miniato allowed a whole-hill isolation zone, which may have reduced overall mortality. Upland regions and other areas not converted fully to agricultural production are usually more biodiverse, with plague circulating among a greater variety of rodents and their fleas. Spillover events, producing human plague cases, are less common than in farmland, even though a greater proportion of rodents are affected by plague. See R. J. Eisen, K. MacMillan, et al. ‘Identification of Risk Factors for Plague in the West Nile Region of Uganda’, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 90, no. 6 (2014): 1047–1058.

  56. 56.

    G. Sforza, F.M. Fiorentini ed i suoi contemporanei lucchesi. Saggio di storia letteraria del secolo xvii (Florence: F. Menozzi, 1879), pp. 66–67.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., pp. 41–57.

  58. 58.

    See here D. Zanetti, ‘A Milano nel 1524: i sospetti del Gentilino’. In C.M. Cipolla and R.S. Lopez (eds.), Fatti e idee di storia economica nei secoli xii-xx. Studi dedicati a Franco Borlandi, pp. 313–137 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976). Zanetti draws on the fortuitous survival of a register of plague evacuees from the southwestern, porta Ticinese district of Milan, an administrative technique that kept families and neighbourhoods together, if only on paper. In this devastating 1524 plague, Milan was still using extramural campgrounds—the Gentilino was a cemetery area for that city district—for plague control, despite the availability of the San Gregorio lazaretto.

  59. 59.

    Cusago was a Visconti villa and hunting park in the fourteenth century, but the property was seized by the Ambrosian Republic oligarchy after Filippo Maria Visconti died in 1447. C. Decio, La peste in Milano nell’anno 1451 e il primo lazzaretto a Cusago (Milan 1900), pp. 14–16, describes uses of Cusago and its dimensions. Beltrami, ‘Il lazzaretto di Milano’, pp. 63–64, reprints the original donation: ‘pertiche 1500 di bosco nel territorio di Cusago’, around 900 hectares. After the Sforza came to power in 1450, Cusago was again made private hunting park; see C. A. Martelli, Ducks and Deer, Profit and Pleasure: Hunters, Game and the Natural Landscapes of Medieval Italy, Graduate Program in History, Ph.D. thesis (Toronto, York University, 2015), chapter 3. On plague control within Milan, 1450–52, see G. Albini, Guerra, fame, peste: Crisi di mortalità e sistema sanitario nella Lombardia tardomedioevale (Bologna: Capelli, 1982), pp. 121–132; A. Bottero, ‘La peste in Milano nel 1399–1400 e l’opera di Gian Galeazzo Visconti’, Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia di Storia dell’Arte Sanitaria, ser. 2, 8 (1942): 17–28; A. Pasi Testa, ‘Alle origini dell’Ufficio di Sanità nel Ducato di Milano e Principato di Pavia’, Archivio storico lombardo, ser. 10, 102 (1976): 376–386.

  60. 60.

    For the various Milanese lazaretto dimensions, which I interpolated from the data he provides, see: Beltrami, ‘Il lazzaretto di Milano’, pp. 18–19, 22, 49. Estimated a little differently, with Crescenzago’s expanse at 260,000 m2 and the eventual San Gregorio location, 150,000 m2. V. Cavenago, Il lazzaretto: storia di un quartiere di Milano, 2nd ed. (Milan: Nuove Edizioni Duomo, 1989), pp. 49–51.

  61. 61.

    See Zanetti, ‘I sospetti del Gentilino’. And on the long-lasting political effects of this plague, see: S. D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A city within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 11, and pp. 61–62.

  62. 62.

    Cavenago, Il lazzaretto, 61–62.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 24–27, provided the text of the Capuchin manuscript. Felice Casati was still alive in 1646 and may have been the other Capuchin informant.

  64. 64.

    G. Ripamonti, La Peste di Milano del 1630 Libri Cinque, Cavati dagli annali della Città, trans. F. Cusani (Milan: Perotta, 1841), Book II, pp. 115–116, notes the Capuchin manuscript but provides only the testimonial to its authenticity, not the detail about rodents and fleas all over the meadow.

  65. 65.

    A. D’Amato, et al., ‘Of Mice and Men: Traces of Life in the Death Registries of the 1630 Plague in Milano’, Journal of Proteomics 180 (2018): 128–137.

  66. 66.

    P. M. Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’. In Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando and Thomas W. Worcester (eds.) Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, pp. 65–96 (Worcester, MA: Clark University; College of Holy Cross, and Worcester Art Museum, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2005). The plague painting done by Cerano himself depicts Borromeo distributing his own clothing and household furnishings to the still quarantined in a tent area outside the city. I have nonetheless found no direct evidence of tents inside the San Gregorio lazaretto during the 1575–77 plague.

  67. 67.

    See here the commonly reproduced sketch of the lazaretto and the surrounding suburban zone, made by an artist-inmate during 1630: G. P. Bonetti, ‘Il lazzaretto di Milano e la peste del 1630, a proposito di un nuovo document iconografico’, Archivio Storico Lombardo 50, fasc. 3/4 (1923): 388–442.

  68. 68.

    Actually there were three adjoining foppone there, two of which were dug to receive the bodies of victims at the lazaretto and some of those who instead died in the city or in transit, See Cavenago, Il Lazzaretto, 190–200; and Redemagni, https://storiedicimiteri.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/i-fopponi-di-milano/

  69. 69.

    Bevacqua, ‘Peste manzoniana’. In Milanese dialect the dock workers were the men with dirty faces, called tencia or tencitt.

  70. 70.

    V. Bevacqua, ‘Peste manzoniana e ‘Madonna di tencitt’, initially published in La Ca’ Granda’, accessed at: www.formazione.eu.com/_documents/cagranda/articoli/2005/0117.pdf. See also the blog of Sergio Codazzi, http://vecchiamilano.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/la-madonna-dei-tencitt, which provides different particulars about the painting, its fate, and the prior who painted it. On the hydrological modernisation of Milan see P. Redondi, M. Richiuti and G. Tartari, ‘Milan, sa nappe, e le Lambro: la quantité au détriment de la qualité’. In Laurence Lestel and Catherine Carré (eds.) Les rivières urbaines et leur pollution, pp. 123–172 (Versailles: Quae, 2003). And see: Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo’, pp. 82–84.

  71. 71.

    A useful overview of Milanese cemeteries and modernisation can be found at www.storiadimilano.it/citta/cimiteri/cimiteri_milanesi.htm. See also P. Redemagni, I cimiteri (Milan: M&B publishing, 2004). The painting survived Allied bombing in 1943, which levelled much of the nearby Ospedale Maggiore.

  72. 72.

    The Coppola painting is reproduced in Hope and Healing (above note 66), catalogue number 26, and is held by the Princeton Art Museum. James Clifton, ‘Art and Plague in Naples’, pp. 97–117, discusses what is more typical of the era: Gargiulo’s manipulation of the piazza’s scale in order to represent all city plague activities. Clifton usefully invokes Roland Barthes’s distinction between conveying a sense of ‘having been there’ (the Gargiulo painting) and ‘being there’ (the Coppola canvas), p. 114. On the Naples plague generally see I. Fusco, ‘La peste del 1656–58 nel Regno di Napoli: diffusione e mortalità’, SIDeS, Popolazione e Storia 1 (2009): 115–138.

  73. 73.

    Cancila, ‘Salute pubblica’.

  74. 74.

    G. A. Bailey, ‘Anthony van Dyck, the Cult of Saint Rosalie and the 1624 Plague in Palermo’. In Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando and Thomas W. Worcester (eds.) Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, pp. 118–133 (Worcester, MA: Clark University; College of Holy Cross, and Worcester Art Museum, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2005). Van Dyck left Sicily in September 1625; we can date the image more closely, through events described in an anonymous report, by a prelate present throughout the plague: S. Salomone-Marino (ed.), ‘La peste in Palermo negli anni 1624–1626: Relatione di anonimo’, Archivio Storico Siciliano 30 (1905): 221–289, here p. 232. An arquebus shot could reach a distance of around 1000 meters. On the discovery of St Rosalie’s remains see E. Frasca and M. Costa, ‘La peste in Sicilia in età moderna: tra scienza e devozione’, Annali della facoltà della formazione Università degli studi di Catania 19 (2020): 106–107.

  75. 75.

    The city council on 23 June decided to hire 150 builders (operarij) to create a capacious lazaretto in Borgo Santa Lucia. It was operational by the night of 24 June, when 66 patients from the previous site, called the Spasimo, were transported there. See Salomone-Marino (ed.), ‘La peste in Palermo’, pp. 231 and 263.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., p. 246: ‘per essere detto luogo molto spatioso, per poter attendere a tutti i bisogni con sollecitudine, cavalcava un animaletto…’.

  77. 77.

    For images of these fields and historical markers, see: https://ilmestiere.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/san-giorgio-lomellina-e-il-campo-della-peste/ and M. Tedeschi, Il bosto, la vigna, la pietra: Botticino nella storia (Brescia: Comune di Botticino, 1988), p. 80.

  78. 78.

    G. Montù, Memorie storiche del gran contagio in Piemonte negli anni 1630 e 31, e specialmente del medesimo in Chieri e ne’ suoi contorni raccolte e pubblicate per la solennità secolare celebrata in questa città in onor di Maria SS.ma delle grazie, 1, 2 & 3 Sett. 1830 (Turin: Giacinto Marietti, 1830), pp. 3–5 on the 200-year-old tradition. I am especially grateful to Susan Einbinder for calling my attention to this work.

  79. 79.

    For examples, a Barnabite friar and layman who died 22 and 28 September were buried ‘in curtili apud murum ecclesiae’ (Montú p. 35); a nobleman’s widow who dictated her will ‘alla cascina detta il Pescòre’ (p. 58); Stefano Piovano made his will at the farm called tetto de’ Piovani, which Montù located precisely between two rural chapels, and hired guards to block the road to the north (pp. 60 and 118). On the choice of lazaretto location, the regulated dress and comportment of hired monati (body-clearers), surgeons, and physicians, see pp. 86–87. The contaminated (brutti) and ‘clean’ (netti) were differently dressed, providing another way for citizens to read the wall-free plague landscapes. Many plague plaques that commemorated the 1630 epidemic were mounted much later, between the 1790s and the 1820s; see Montù, Memorie storiche, 104–106.

  80. 80.

    Montú , Memorie storiche, 39. It was also called the ‘Lazzaretto di Valle in Chieri’. The Capuchin monastery was popularly called S. Anna del Lazzaretto, but Montù, p. 49, claims that it was field used as a burial site for plague victims, and belonged to a different monastery. There was also a ‘lazzaretto di Baldissero’ closer to Turin than Vallèro. The town of Moncucco used various lazarettos; Moriondo instead sent and buried victims at the ‘cascina delli Zucca’. In other words, town victims were seeded across the rural landscape.

  81. 81.

    Similar improvised burial plots have been excavated in Provence. See, for example, B. Bizot, P. Reynaud, and P.-H. Rigaud, ‘Le cimetière de l’infirmerie des Fédons (Lambesc, Bouches du Rhône) avril—septembre 1590’. In M. Signoli, et al. (eds.), Peste: entre épidemies et societies, pp. 67–70 (Florence: Florence University Press, 2007).

  82. 82.

    S. K. Cohn, Jr. Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 77–139.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., pp. 77–94. The single most important treatise appears to be Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia’s massive tome on the plague in Palermo, Informatione del pestifero et contagioso morbo del protomedico siciliano (1576). Cohn finds it a medically traditional treatise that adds a narrative retelling of the recent plague in Palermo. Cancila, ‘Salute pubblica’, instead finds it a novel management-oriented plague treatise, given over to Ingrassia’s recommended procedures and protocols for mitigating a contagious epidemic. The work was soon translated into Latin becoming widely known outside Italy, as well as widely used in north Italy.

  84. 84.

    For example, the contemporary account of G. M. Montini, Della peste in Bassano nel 1631 (Bassano: Baseggio, 1855). Bassano not only was a refuge for Venetian and Veronese merchants and noblemen fleeing plague in 1630, but the whole region was located along thoroughfares used by the German army. Udine, to the north and east, also suffered a severe plague in 1629–1630, as did the whole of Lombardy to the west and southwest.

  85. 85.

    One of England’s main places for plague tourism, Eyam, in the Peak District, has long shaped a grim story to accentuate plague’s contagion and the heroism of villagers who isolated themselves, sparing their neighbours through their sacrifice. But it was mostly a story ‘established, manipulated and reshaped to fit changing literary and historical fashions’: see P. Wallis, ‘A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666–2000’, History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 31–56. Of 330 villagers 259 died, but those deaths were spread out across a 14-month interval.

  86. 86.

    Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., ‘Plague spreaders’. In S. K. Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS, pp. 153–93 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  87. 87.

    Stevens Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals, pp. 184–193. She further estimated that pesthouse mortality accounted for a significantly lower proportion of overall (or plague only?) deaths in 1630–1631, and she meticulously parsed the evidence on which her numbers were calculated. However, for evidence about the devastating 1483–1486 plague in Milan she should have relied on G. Albini’s ‘La mortalità in un grande centro urbano nel ‘400: il caso di Milano’. In R. Comba, G. Piccinni, G. Pinto (eds.), Strutture familiare: epidemie, migrazione nell’ Italia medieval, pp. 117–134 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiani, 1984). This was the epidemic that persuaded Milanese authorities to invest in a grand lazaretto.

  88. 88.

    Salomone-Marino, ‘La peste in Palermo’, pp. 263–76.

  89. 89.

    Stevens Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals, argues that unburied bodies may have contributed to excess pesthouse mortality. Such sights clearly increased terror, but cadavers do not usually pose a direct threat because most infectious pathogens require a living host to survive and replicate. So, too, hungry fleas require a living host. Still the best single introduction to the role that ectoparasites of all sorts played in shift of disease experience, premodern to modern, is J. C. Riley, ‘Insects and the European Mortality Decline’, The American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (1986): 833–858.

  90. 90.

    C. Lynteris and R. Stasch, ‘Photography and the Unseen’, Visual Anthropology Review 35, no. 1 (2019): 5–9.

  91. 91.

    K. Eaton, ‘Historical Insights from ‘Modern’ Plague: plague from the 19th to 21st Century’, working paper, Department of Anthropology: McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, 20 June 2018; and M. A. Spyrou, et al., ‘Phylogeography of the Second Plague Pandemic Revealed through Analysis of Historical Yersinia pestis Genomes’, Nature Communications 10, no. 4470 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12154-0

  92. 92.

    Unfortunately, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. makes this assertion in his otherwise valuable Cultures of Plague, pp. 39–76.

  93. 93.

    The thoughtful, COVID-19-era study by Frasca and Costa, ‘La peste in Sicilia’, is interesting here. The authors summarise the Ingrassia treatise composed in Palermo, 1575, (see above note 80); his costly, sustained attention to the minutiae of innovative contagion control is usually held responsible for the much-reduced mortality the city faced when compared to its neighbours. While Frasca and Costa cite traditional blame for this plague (importations by ship from areas of the Afro-Mediterranean), they themselves neither support nor reject such conclusion. As they show, strong evidence of ongoing plague spread in the Sicilian hinterlands supports the retrospective view that plague could have been endemic in some areas of the island. I find their biomedically agnostic approach to the historical evidence quite useful.

  94. 94.

    Stuart Borsch and Tarek Sabraa, ‘Refugees of the Black Death: Quantifying rural migration for plague and other environmental disasters’, Annales de Démographie Historique 134, no. 2 (2017): 63–93.

Acknowledgements

My students in a senior history seminar at Wofford College (Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2018) initially inspired aspects of this enquiry, and led to my efforts at the St Andrews’ conference and another on ‘Cities in Crisis’, summer 2018 and held at the Biblioteca Herziana (Rome, Italy). I am particularly grateful to Daniele Abdon and Margaret Bell, organisers of the Rome conference; to Daniele in particular for sharing her photographs of the Lazaretto Nuovo and bibliography she shared on recent architectural perspectives on urban crises; to Lori Jones, Nükhet Varlik and Hendrik Poinar for advice at multiple junctures; to the anonymous referee and his/her suggestions; and above all to Christos Lynteris for redirecting my historical gaze.

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    Ann G. Carmichael

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    Christos Lynteris

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Carmichael, A.G. (2021). Pesthouse Imaginaries. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_4

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