Lazareti

This guide to Lazareti, the stone quarantine complex beside Dubrovnik's old harbor, opens with a question: Ragusa's first quarantine law in 1377 set the wait at thirty days, so why does the word the world inherited from it mean forty? It follows the Republic's escalating defenses against plague, from stranding ships on bare islands to raising this complex of ten halls and five courtyards between 1590 and 1642, and the outbreak in 1526 that slipped through anyway and shut the city down for six months. Stand in one of the courtyards and picture it filled with quarantined crews rather than art shows.