It seems that this little house, most likely used as a guardhouse, wasn’t built until the 19th century.
Before that, guardhouses stood outside the Lazaretto complex. They housed sanitation soldiers, lead by the Lazaretto captain. There were 15 of them in regular service, and they often received reinforcements.
It was the soldiers’ duty to conduct quarantine measures, while also performing all other duties, from weighing goods to removing dead bodies. For every additional duty they received extra pay.
Soldiers in the Lazarettos were armed with rifles and shortswords.
A stick was the basic tool of trade for a Ragusan sanitation soldier, and it never left his side. He used it to push away, detain and keep quarantined persons under control.
Sanitation soldiers had their hands full with pretty nervous residents of the Lazarettos.
In 1760, a Lazaretto resident, quite possibly drunk, spent time in the quarantine by playing with what he thought was an empty rifle. He waved it about the Lazaretto square and yelled jovially: “I’ll kill someone.” The soldiers told him: “Put that rifle away, the devil might load it even if it’s empty, and don’t point it at anyone.” At that moment the rifle went off and killed a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On multiple occasions the Lazarettos resembled a battlefield. Angry men threw stones at each other, beat each other with fists, and hit each other over the heads using chibouks, long tobacco pipes, while sanitation soldiers tried to calm them down and separate them.