{"id":8034,"date":"2020-04-26T13:09:51","date_gmt":"2020-04-26T19:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8034"},"modified":"2020-04-26T13:09:51","modified_gmt":"2020-04-26T19:09:51","slug":"dubrovnik-the-medieval-city-designed-around-quarantine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8034","title":{"rendered":"Dubrovnik: The medieval city designed around quarantine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/travel\/story\/20200421-dubrovnik-the-medieval-city-designed-around-quarantine\">Kristin Vukovi?<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Since ancient times, societies have attempted to separate people with disease from those who remained unaffected, with references to self-isolation dating back to the Old Testament. As Covid-19 sweeps across the globe, we are advised to \u201cself-quarantine\u201d if we have recently returned from a part of the world where the virus is rapidly spreading, or if we have knowingly come into contact with an infected person. To understand the importance of self-quarantining during this modern-day pandemic, it\u2019s helpful to look back to the history of the word \u201cquarantine\u201d itself, which traces its origins to medieval Europe.<\/p>\n<p>Two linked trade ports<\/p>\n<p>Like Venice, Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa) has always been a city popular with travellers from around the world; today, both are Unesco World Heritage sites. During medieval times, Venice and Ragusa were powerful trade ports with intertwined histories: Ragusa recognised Venetian suzerainty from 1205 until 1358, but still retained much of its independence. In 1420, when Dalmatia (a coastal region bordering the Adriatic Sea, now mostly in present-day Croatia) was sold to Venice, Dubrovnik remained a free city in all but name.<\/p>\n<p>The word \u201cquarantine\u201d has Italian roots: in an effort to protect coastal cities from the Black Death ravaging 14th-Century Europe, ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days (quaranta giorni) before landing, a practice that eventually became known as quarantine \u2013 derived from \u2018quarantino\u2019, the Italian word for a 40-day period.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kristin Vukovi?: Since ancient times, societies have attempted to separate people with disease from those who remained unaffected, with references to self-isolation dating back to the Old Testament. As Covid-19 sweeps across the globe, we are advised to \u201cself-quarantine\u201d if we have recently returned from a part of the world where the virus is rapidly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8034"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8034"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8035,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8034\/revisions\/8035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}