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

a dreary extent of stagnant, slimy water, a melancholy road to travel over: on the contrary the marshes have more resemblance to the rich plains of Lombardy; yes, they are like them, rich to abundance; grass and herbage grow here with a succulence and luxuriance which the north of Italy cannot exhibit . . . the immense plain stretches itself out with its tall grass, and its fresh, green marsh-plants. Canals cross one another, and drain off the water which stands in ponds and lakes covered with reeds and ⁹ Gregorovius (1902: 279).

¹⁰ A more typical example of the early modern travellers was the famous nurse Florence Nightingale, who arrived in Rome in early November 1847 and departed at the end of March 1848 (Keele (1981) ). She toured the hospitals of Rome, including the Santo Spirito hospital which accommodated patients with malaria, and noted the atrocious conditions prevailing in them. Blewitt (1843: 466) noted that few travellers stayed in Rome during the summer.

¹¹ De Muro (1933); Doni (1667: 101).

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23. The extremely flat Pontine plain, viewed from Sermoneta.

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broad-leaved water-lilies . . . I met a peasant, whose pale, yellow, sickly exterior contradicted the vigorous fertility which the marshes presented.¹²

Another traveller, an Englishman, H. Matthews, had yet another different perspective:

The Pontine Marshes, of which one has heard such dreadful accounts, appeared to me to differ but little from many parts of Cambridgeshire, though the livid aspect of the miserable inhabitants of this region is a shocking proof of its unwholesomeness. The short but pathetic reply, made to an inquiring traveller, is well known. ‘How do you manage to live here?’ said he, to a group of these animated spectres. ‘We die!’¹³

Given what is now known about the demographic effects of malaria on the inhabitants of the marshlands of early modern England, the comparison to ‘many parts of Cambridgeshire’

(before the draining of the East Anglian Fens) is entirely apposite.¹⁴

Nevertheless all the early modern travellers tended to give partial accounts of the Pontine region. For a more comprehensive description, it is necessary to turn to different types of source, for example the description of the region, concentrating on its forests, in an official Italian-government publication dating to the late nineteenth century.¹⁵ This description, which puts the beech trees in their proper position on the hilltops, explicitly compares the Pontine forest to the tropical forests of equatorial regions, a description which is justified, since the flooded Pontine forest undoubtedly ¹² Andersen (1845: ii. 1–3).

¹³ Matthews (1820: 167–8).

¹⁴ Nicholls (2000).

¹⁵ Chapter in Monografia (1881) entitled Sulle condizioni dell’agricoltura e pastorizia della provincia di Roma, pp. xcix and cx–cxi: ‘ Questo regione non apparisce che come un vasto terreno paludoso, interse-cato qua e là, segnatamente verso il mare, da selve annosissime, che la credenza sulla loro efficacia per diminuire il flagello delle malarie, o piuttosto le difficoltà dei trasporti, riparmiarono fino a qui . . . Queste piante [sc. il pistacchio lentisco, il ramerino, la Daphne collina, la filaria e il mirto] unite insieme formano [sc. on the sandy soils closest to the sea] talora dei macchioni densissimi che diventano anche pressochè insuperabili, quando ad essi si aggiungono formando quasi un graticulato di liane, le smilaci, le viti selvatiche e le clematidi. Più dentro terra, ma sempre in grande vicinanza del mare, e qualche volta anche in immediato contatto di questo, si hanno selve di alto fusto costituite da cerri, da quercie peduncolate, da olmi e da frassini.

Le più grandi di queste selve sono rimaste nella striscia di terra, che fiancheggia il mare nelle palude Pontine, e non di rado anche queste rimangono impenetrabili a cagione delle acque che invadono il suolo. Non sappiamo se altrove, in Italia e fuori, si possa avere una immagine degli smisurati boschi delle regioni equatoriali, migliore di quella che offrir possono i boschi Pontini . . . nelle parti ondulate e nelle colline si hanno i boschi cedui semplici ed i boschi cedui con sgamolli o capitozze. Le specie dominanti in questi boschi cedui sono quasi sempre quercie rovere e quercie peduncolate con mistura di lecci e di arbusti, come l’albero di Giuda, il cornio-lo, il nocciolo, ecc. Se dalla pianura e terreni adiacenti si risale ai monti, si trovano qua e là boschi di quercie e di castagno, a ceduo od a fustaja, e poi finalmente, verso le sommità dei monti, il faggio, il quale rappresenta in questi luoghi, come nelle rimanenti parti dell’Appennino, l’albero più diffuso’. Cf. Quilici (1979: 77).

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resembles, on a much smaller scale, some of the rain forests in South America, for example.

Having gained some impressions of this environment in more recent times, it is necessary to consider whether the Pontine environment was the same in antiquity. There are indeed various indications that the Pontine Marshes might once not have been quite so intimidating as Berti’s description suggests, or at least not have occupied as extensive a geographical area as they did in the early modern period. Pliny the Elder described the Pontine Marshes as an area in which there were once twenty-four cities, suggesting that there had once been considerable human occupation of the area: Another marvel, next to Circeii, is the Pontine Marsh, where there were twenty four cities according to Mucianus, three times consul.¹⁶

The archaeologists who are surveying the Pontine area believe that these lost cities were mainly situated in the region immediately south of Velletri, following Nicolai’s interpretation two hundred years ago, in other words they were not actually located in the marshes themselves, although the wetlands were certainly exploited. In the seventeenth century the marshes proper stretched from Cisterna to Terracina, according to Doni.¹⁷ The most famous of these lost cities was Suessa Pometia, which gave its name to the whole Pontine region. It vanished so completely after its destruction by the Romans that even its precise location is not known for sure (perhaps at ancient Satricum, or near modern Cisterna).¹⁸

Atina, east of the marshes, is explicitly linked to death