“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”

Attributed to Mark Twain

On Sunday, we awoke early, as always, to find out that sweeping new measures had put in place to “lockdown” the population of much of northern Italy, including the province of Veneto where we live.  Movement into and out of the province was to be curtailed. This new quarantine was meant to halt the further spread of a new, and therefore feared, virus – COVID-19.

It began in China, in what feels like ages ago, in late December 2019.  By January 2020, the growing spread of the virus had captured the imagination of breathless media reports.  Yet, it seemed distant from those of us in Europe.

Then it appeared in Italy, and soon spread to the rest of Europe.  It’s foothold wasn’t just Italy but specifically the north of Italy.  This wasn’t the first time, of course, that a virus that terrorized Europe had first made landfall in Northern Italy. 

At Kaffa on the Black Sea, an Italian outpost had been established to trade with the Mongols.  During a lengthy siege in 1347, the Mongol horde surrounding the city began to die. Before withering away, the besiegers catapulted the diseased corpses of their dead comrades over the walls of Kaffa to ensure the residents of the city would suffer with them.  Soon trading vessels returned to Italy carrying the deadly virus silently amongst its other cargo.

A chronicler of the time imagined the dialogue between those merchants and God,  “we set sail to our cities and entered our homes and alas, we carried with us the darts of death, and at the very moment that our families hugged and kissed us, even as as we were speaking, we were compelled to spread poison from our mouths. It reached Venice around January 1348. 

In 2020, our family felt fine.  We refused to join growing fearful clamour and decided to visit what once had been the world’s greatest trading city-Venice.

On a beautiful spring day, we boarded the transport boat which brings commuters to their destinations in the city.  Sailing the waters of the Grand Canal, we passed a parade of beautiful structures which stood as a testament to the greatness which had been Venice.

By March 1348, the plague began consuming Venice.  According to the chronicler Lorenzo de Monacis, “It raged so fiercely that …all the places were crammed with corpses.  At night, many were buried in the public streets, some under the floors of their own homes; many died unconfessed; corpses rotted in abandoned houses… fathers, sons, brothers, neighbors, and friends abandoned each other…Not only would doctors not visit anyone, they fled from the sick…. The same terror seized the priests and clerics….There was no rational thought about the crisis… The whole city was a tomb.”

A similar terror gave us an unexpected windfall in 2020.  A city that suffers from a modern horde of tourists seeking their next instagram-worthy selfie is now empty.  Surrounded by blue skies and bluer waters, we admired the kaleidoscope of ornate villas and churches which fused eastern as well western architectural styles. 

I savored my pricey bellini alone at Hemingway’s old haunt, Harry’s Bar.  Our girls raced their scooters across the iconic and now vacant Piazza San Marco.

However, in 1348, the number of casualties from the plague meant special boats had to be commissioned to collect the dead from abandoned houses to bury them in heaps in islands outside the city.  By the time the plague had finally collected its toll, approximately two-thirds of the population had died.

According to historian Roger Crowley, “For 150 years, Venice had advanced on a rising tide of European prosperity, growing wealth, and booming populations.  Maritime ventures, characterized by an optimistic culture of risk-taking, had brought rich returns. But it was the rampant materialism, the expansion of trade routes, and the commercial connections across vast distances that brought not only silk, spices, ivory, pearls, grain, and fish, but also the plague bacillus from inner Asia.  It was the Italian maritime republics who were charged with carrying death to Europe.”

The plague would continue to strike Venice, and Europe, in intervals for another three hundred years.

In the face of fear, the unexplainable, and unstoppable, humans sought faith.  Among the many beautiful chapels in Venice, one stood out during our visit. San Maria de Salute jutting proudly into the Canale di San Marco was built in thanks to the lifting of the final plague in 1630.

In our modern era, people also seek solace in faith.  One image above all others seems to burn in my memory. While driving through our small rural village, the faithful stood in silent prayer outside the locked doors of the village church which had been banned from holding services in another desperate bid to halt the spread of the new virus.

It is glib to say that history repeats itself, but it is ignorant to ignore the patterns of human existence.  The clues of the past provide the rhymes of the future. In the meantime, in the center of the supposed storm, we lived for the moment in the company of loved ones.