No stranger to plagues, Venice opens film fest with caution

Visitors to Venice could be forgiven for not realizing that beyond the majesty of St. Mark's Square and the romance of gondola rides lies a city that helped provide a baseline of what the world knows today about containing pandemics.

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It was here that the term "quarantine" was coined, after merchant ships arriving in the 15th-century Venetian Republic were moored for 40 days ("quaranta giorni" in Italian) to see if their crews were afflicted with the plague. It was here that the first isolated pestilence hospital was built on a solitary island in the lagoon, a precursor to today's COVID-19 isolation wards. And it was in Venice that 16th-century doctors donned beak-nosed masks filled with aromatic herbs to cleanse the air they breathed when treating the sick, an attempt at self-protection that today is the favored choice for Venetian Carnival costumes.

Venice's central place in the history of battling pandemics provides a relevant backdrop to this year's Venice Film Festival, which opens Wednesday with the premiere of Pedro Almodovar's in-competition film "Parallel Mothers." Almodovar developed the project during Spain's 2020 coronavirus lockdown, one of the harshest in the West.

In a pre-opening screening Tuesday, Italian director Andre Segre presents a short documentary shot last year showing how Venice organizers coped with COVID-19 to stage the first and only in-person international film festival during the first year of the outbreak, a limited affair that nevertheless showed it could be done. Cannes came back to life this year after skipping 2020, and other big festivals went largely virtual after the pandemic erupted.

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The scenes in Segre's film, shocking then, normal now, feature half-full theaters for...