Lazzaretto Nuovo

Venedig · Italy · Abandoned site

On the quarantine island a woman was excavated in 2006 with a brick wedged into her mouth — folk belief's cure for a so-called shroud-eater.

Lazzaretto Nuovo served from 1468 as a quarantine station: ships and crews were held here for forty days before being allowed on towards Venice. During the plague waves the island also became a burial ground. In excavations between 2006 and 2008 an archaeological team led by Matteo Borrini found the remains of a woman with a brick wedged into her mouth, buried around the plague of 1576. Jamming something into a dead person's mouth was, in the folk belief of the time, the remedy against what was called a shroud-eater — a corpse thought to chew through its own winding cloth and pass the contagion on to the living. The woman was a plague victim like all the others on the island, and the grave is now one of the lagoon's most studied records of what fear makes people do.

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Where is Lazzaretto Nuovo located?

Lazzaretto Nuovo is in Venedig, Italy.

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