quarantine：海上的四十天

In 2020, "quarantine" suddenly became one of the most-used words in the world. But the word itself is more than 600 years old, and it began with ships, plague and the number forty. In the 14th century, a terrible disease called the Black Death swept across Europe, killing millions of people. Port cities were especially at risk, because ships arriving from other places could bring the disease with them. In 1377, the city of Ragusa – today called Dubrovnik, in Croatia – came up with an idea. Ships and travellers arriving from areas with plague had to wait in isolation for 30 days before they were allowed into the city. If nobody got sick during that time, they could enter. Other cities copied the idea, and Venice, one of the busiest ports in Europe, made the waiting period longer: 40 days. In the Venetian dialect of Italian, "forty days" was quaranta giorni, and the period of isolation came to be called a quarantena. From there, the word passed into English as "quarantine". Why 40 days? Nobody knows for sure. It may simply have seemed like a safe length of time. But the number 40 also had special meaning in Christian tradition. Lent, for example, lasts 40 days. Today, of course, a quarantine can last for any length of time, from a few days to several weeks. But every time we use the word, we're remembering those ships waiting patiently outside Venice more than six centuries ago.