6 years ago, in 2016, Riders Jeff Maynow and Nikki Twilly began working on a book.

It was a book about quarantine, which, at that point, at least for the general public,

was a largely forgotten practice.

It had produced all of these really beautiful ruins all over the world, buildings that had

been turned into hotels or had been converted into convention centers or offices or art galleries,

or that just been left to decay in the woods.

So a few years ago, Jeff and Nikki set out on a quest.

A quest to document these structures and the reason that they'd been created.

They traveled around the world to Australia, London, New Mexico, the Adriatic.

They toured crumbling ruins, a nuclear waste disposal site, and even the CDC.

They spent years researching and writing about this abstract thing, this idea,

that tied all of these places together.

And then it happened to them.

It was really funny, while we were researching the book, we were like,

we have to find someone who's experienced quarantine to talk to and get that inside

or kind of perspective on what it's really like to live through.

I'm Dylan Therese and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's

strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, Jeff Maynow and Nikki Twilly take us inside the Malta Lazaredo,

a crumbling, centuries-old structure that was built to contain the spread of disease.

And they take us inside the history and the future of quarantine.

More after this.

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