In the 1300s, Europeans lived in fear of the plague claiming lives across the continent. In 2020, Europeans face the threat of the coronavirus, a pandemic that has killed more than 728,000 worldwide.

While much about life has changed between the two cataclysmic health crises, one thing has not: mankind’s thirst for wine.

Between the wrath of the Black Death in the 1300s and the Italian Plague in the 1600s, wine merchants in the Italian region of Tuscany built “wine windows” to protect buyers and sellers from coming into close contact.

The socially distant precaution was ahead of its time.

“It’s kind of amazing, because people didn’t know about germs in those days,” said Mary Forrest, one of the founding members of the Associazione Buchette del Vino, or Wine Windows Association. The association is a nonprofit established five years ago to document and protect the historic structures. “People didn’t know where the plague came from; they didn’t discover that till much later,” she says.

[Rome is ready for visitors again, but you can expect its restaurants and cafes to look a little different]

The …continued .
[Source: Washington Post]