Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy, Robert Sallares [reading a book TXT] 📗

classical Athens than is generally supposed by historians, this helps to explain many important problems of Greek history; for example, how the Athenian citizen population was apparently able to recover very rapidly from repeated military catastrophes (as well as the ‘plague of Athens’ in 430 ) during the period of the fifth-century empire (cf. Sallares (1991: 95–9) ).

6

The Pontine Marshes

The Pontine Marshes have attracted little attention in modern historiography. The most comprehensive twentieth-century accounts of their ancient history were written by Bianchini, a rare book which attracted little attention owing to its publication at the beginning of the Second World War, and Hofmann, a very long Pauly-Wissowa article described by Brunt as ‘remarkable for its ready acceptance of annalistic details and lack of scientific data’.¹ Early modern descriptions of the region are very important.² In fact, virtually all the historical questions considered by twentieth-century historians had already been debated by writers in the eighteenth century. In the year 1800 Nicola Maria Nicolai published a very substantial work on the Pontine region consisting of four books.

The first two of these books provide an extremely detailed survey of the literary and documentary evidence for the history of the Pontine Marshes from antiquity onwards, as a prelude to a description of the bonifications of Pope Pius VI in the last two books. In view of the scarcity of twentieth-century literature on the subject, it is still well worth reading Nicolai’s books today. The main contribution of modern research has come from archaeology rather than history. Field surveys by Dutch and Italian archaeologists have recently added important new data. Collari described the history of bonification attempts in the Pontine Marshes.³

It is difficult to imagine now what the Pontine Marshes were like before Mussolini’s bonifications. Some parts of the marshes were permanently submerged, while other areas dried out in the summer each year. There were flooded forests in winter. In the early modern period, maize was planted in June and harvested in November in some parts of the Pontine Marshes which were submerged under water in winter.⁴ It was these seasonal, open marshes ¹ Bianchini (1939); Hofmann (1956); Brunt (1987: 349 n. 6).

² e.g. De Tournon (1831: i. 112–39, 319–21, ii. 213–37); Hare (1884: ii. 245–63).

³ Voorips et al. (1991); Attema (1993); Collari (1949).

⁴ De Felice (1965: 55–7, 108). D’Erme et al. (1984) shows numerous photographs of early modern paintings of the Pontine region.

Pontine Marshes

169

Veii

M O N T I

Tivoli

S I M B RU I N I

er Tiber

Riv

Bonifica di

Rome

Osteria dell’Osa

M O N T I P R E N E S T I N I

Maccarese

Praeneste

Ponte

Isola

Galena

Lago

Frascati

M O N T I E R N I C I

Sacra

Albano

C O L L I

Ostia

A L B A N I

Alatri

Castel Fusano

Albano

Nemi

Rocca

Massima

Velletri

Cori

M O

Frosinone

N T

Ardea

Norba

I

Cisterna

L

Ninfa

Norma

E PIN

T

Sermoneta

I

y

Po

Sezze

r

n

Latina

t

Amaseno

i

r

n e

Priverno

h

Anzio

M

Pontinia

e

a

M O N T I

Sonnino

r

AU S O N I

Astura

n

s h

N

e

i

s

Fondi

S E LVA D I

a

C I R C E O

n

Sabaudia

S

CEO

Terracina

e a Lago di Paola MONTE

CIR

San Felice Circeo

Map 4. Southern Lazio

which were so lethal as a source of malaria, as Palladius understood. The interior of the Pontine forest itself, although visually intimidating, was still dangerous with regard to malaria, but not quite so dangerous. Only a small fraction of the marshes survived Mussolini’s attentions. What is left is preserved today in the Parco Nazionale del Circeo. Tito Berti, who travelled in August and commented that bad air ( aria cattiva) began at Cisterna, described the Pontine forest in 1884 as follows:⁵

The Pontine forest creates fear and horror. Before entering it cover your neck and face well, because swarms of large bloodsucking insects are waiting for you in this great heat of summer, between the shade of the leaves, like animals thinking intently about their prey . . . Trees of every species bow towards you, stand erect in front of you, prevent you from passing: a dense network of shrubs, plants, leaves, forces you to stop: you make a path with an axe, knocking down the obstacles; and here you find a green ⁵ Attema (1993: 36–41) discussed Berti’s journey through the Pontine region.

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Pontine Marshes

20. The Centro culturale polivalente, Via Cavour 23, in Pontinia, another of Mussolini’s new towns in the Pontine region. It houses the Museo La malaria e la sua storia, which documents the campaigns to eradicate malaria from the region in the 1930s.

zone, putrid, nauseating, where thousands of insects move around, where thousands of horrible marsh plants grow under a suffocating sun.⁶

This was the landscape, so close to Rome itself, which the Romans were unable to master even when they had conquered most of the rest of the then known world. To gain an idea of what that landscape was like it is necessary to resort to more recent descriptions of it, like Berti’s, because it is not described in ancient sources. From this omission significant conclusions may be drawn.

Pliny the Elder (quoted below) did indeed use the word miraculum, a marvel, in connection with the Pontine Marshes. Yet he failed to describe this marvel, even though it was so close to Rome. Pliny in his Natural History gives us countless bits of information about ⁶ T. Berti (1884), Le Palude Pontine, quoted by Pratesi and Tassi (1977: 137–40): Il bosco pontino mette paura e ribrezzo. Prima di penetrarvi copritevi bene il collo e la faccia, perché nuvoli di grossi tafani vi aspettano in questa caldura, fra il rezzo delle foglie, come animali pensanti intenti alla preda . . . Alberi d’ogni specie s’incurvano verso di voi, vi spiccano dritti, vi chiudono il passo: una fitta rete d’arboscelli, di piante, di foglie, vi obbliga a fermarvi: vi fate strada con l’accetta, abbattendo gli ostacoli; ed ecco vi si presenta una zona verde, putrida, nauseante, ove corrono migliaia di insetti, ove crescono sotto un sole soffocante migliaia di orribili piante palustri.

21. View from the

northern slopes of

Monte Circeo of the

Lago di Sabaudia

o di Paola, the most

southerly of the four

lakes stretched along

the coast of the

Pontine region behind

the coastal