Forty days at anchor gave us the word 'quarantine'

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian Italian quarantena, or '40 days' — the isolation period imposed on ships arriving from plague-stricken ports. Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, pioneered a 30-day version in 1377; Venice extended it to 40 in 1448, a number that also carried religious weight from Lent and the biblical flood.

— Standard etymological and historical accounts, Quarantine — Venice and Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 14th–15th centuries