When science made its way into religion, Venice 21 November
We are obviously talking about 400 years ago. Humanity has long since learned a distant treasure of experience (?). The fun remains of crossing the Grand Canal on the floating bridge. The cure for the plague are antibiotics, discovered by chance in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, who together with Ernst Chain and Howard W. Florey will get the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945. It took hundreds of years.
A party, one of the most important in the city, a real anniversary that has become an identity event. In memory of a pandemic of centuries ago: a plague epidemic. We are in Venice and the festival is that of the Salute which is celebrated every year on November 21st. A religious festival but above all a great popular festival in which most of the (very few, not counting Mestre which is formally part of Venice) participate in the city in the middle of the lagoon. For the occasion, a temporary bridge is built that joins the shore from the San Marco side of the Grand Canal to the other on which the Salute church, more simply the Salute, is located. The bridge remains for only three days and is then dismantled for the following year. The Venetian people cross the bridge towards the church remembering the procession that took place centuries ago. Entering the church to leave candles that only a small part will be lit given the large turnout (reduced if necessary to comply with the rules of the current pandemic). For the occasion, as happens for other Venetian festivals (and not only), the recurrence is linked to some gastronomic specialties that can only be eaten on this occasion. The pancakes, donuts cooked in oil at the stalls near the church and the castradina, a dish based on salted, smoked and seasoned leg of mutton, with which it is made, with the addition of cabbage, onions and wine, a soup that is eaten only on the eve of the feast of Health. Montone that since 1173 arrived in Venice from what Croatia and Albania are today.
Between 1575 and 1577 there was an epidemic of plague in Venice which killed a third of the city’s population. The Venetian Senate thought about the construction of a votive church that should have served to solicit divine intervention to save the city. The church will be built by Andrea Palladio who died in 1580 before the church was built in 1592. The divine intervention, for believers, worked since the epidemic ceased two months after the start of construction in July 1577. And the Feast of the Redeemer which has since taken place in July, except in recent years, due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Also in this case a long bridge of boats is built to go to the church by walking on the water.
Why was divine intervention necessary? Did the Venetians (and Europeans) understand something about what the plague was and how did it spread? Faced with the spread and severity of the epidemic, authorities took a series of measures that were quite similar. Alberto Zampieri wrote about medicine: “To put guards on the state borders so that no historian could enter without a health bill attesting to the state of health; prohibition of fairs and markets; careful surveillance at the gates of the city; appointment of commissioners with various public health duties; establishment of hospitals to isolate those affected; burial of the dead in mass graves, then covered with lime; burning of infected items (both clothes, any cloths and even furniture); appointment of special doctors to whom to entrust the care of the sick; call for quarantines to try to eradicate the epidemic. ” And he adds: “For the therapy, this was the most varied: among the basic medicines, the theriac (with which it was believed that many diseases were cured), the Belzoar stone, the mithridate, the Orvieto, various types of portentous pills, the ingestion of preparations based on precious stones, oil against poisons, sealed earth, some medicinal herbs (such as tormentilla, borage, angelica, milk thistle. Among the many miraculous specialties, there was that of pounding together arsenic, carnations, saffron, ginger and rue, put them in a bag to carry over the shirt on the side of the heart. This was a sure remedy to protect oneself from the disease. “And it was quite natural to turn to the saints and obviously invoke the intervention of the Madonna.
The Venetians understood that the only possible defense was quarantine. As Mariano Montagnin recalled, “It was agreed that a ship, coming from the East or in any case from areas at risk, left outside the city for forty days would reveal any epidemics: if nothing happened, the men unload the goods, which in the meantime had also been ‘they ventilate, and go ashore, otherwise they would all die on the ship. ” But an unexpected happened. On June 8, 1630, the ambassador of the Duke of Mantua, Marquis de Strigis, arrived in Venice; outbreaks of plague had been identified in Mantua. Given the importance of the character, he did not go to quarantine at the Lazzaretto Nuovo, but on the island of San Clemente, where he had contact with a carpenter who brought the disease to the city. The first Lazzaretto was built in 1423: the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on the island of Santa Maria di Nazaret. The second, the Lazzaretto Nuovo, in 1468, on the island called Murada vineyard, Along the path that leads to Torcello. There will be 16 months of death, from 48 infections in July, to a thousand in September and 14 thousand in November. Doge Nicolò Contarini made a vow to the Virgin Mary to build a large church in her honor ”. And he adds: “the trade could not stop, on pain of the disappearance of the city. Thus, many patricians died just to stay in the city and took care of the interests of the family: after the plague of 1348, fifty Venetian patrician families disappeared. “
Architect of the Salute church will be a very young Baldassarre Longhena. Construction begin in 1631 and will be consecrated in 1687. Again as with Palladio the architect will die before the completion of the church. The plague of 1630 is the one mentioned by Manzoni, in Milan, in chapter XXXI de The betrothed: “At the end of March, illnesses and deaths began to become frequent in every district of the city … The doctors opposed the opinion of the contagion, now unwilling to confess what they had laughed at, and having to give a generic name to the new disease , having become too common and too obvious to go without, they found that of malignant fevers, of pestilent fevers: miserable transaction, indeed swindling of words, and which nevertheless did great harm; because, figuring to recognize the truth, to see still not to let believe, that the evil of contact “.
We are obviously talking about 400 years ago. Humanity has long since learned a distant treasure of experience (?). The fun remains of crossing the Grand Canal on the floating bridge, obviously in the sense from the San Marco side towards health. The cure for the plague are antibiotics, discovered by chance in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, who together with Ernst Chain and Howard W. Florey will get the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945. It took hundreds of years.