Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the New Lazaretto built in Ancona in the mid-eighteenth-century as a case study to explore the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of early modern Mediterranean borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of early modern Mediterranean borderlands. In particular, it will focus on the New Lazaretto built in Ancona (Italy) after the city became a free port in 1732. In the course of the eighteenth century Ancona became a major port city in the Papal State and engaged in conspicuous trade across the Eastern Mediterranean. After the city became a free port, the increase in maritime traffic led pope Clement XII to commission the creation of a new quarantine station. The famous architect Luigi Vanvitelli was charged with the task of completing the project. The result was the creation of an impressive pentagonal artificial island located in the city's port. Being big and beautiful, the new Lazaretto became a focal point in the city's urban scene. Its history offers a particularly felicitous point of entry into the investigation of the role quarantine stations as liminal spaces that marked physical, social, cultural and symbolic borders, and worked as sites of surveillance, detention and segregation as well as negotiation, translation and exchange. This paper will consider the early life of Ancona's New Lazaretto in order to examine how its spaces and practices participated in the making and breaking physical, social and cultural frontiers. One of my aims is to explore how the New Lazaretto reconfigured relations among urban and maritime spaces, medical knowledge and the regulation of both human and non-human movement in and out of the city.