History - Southern Italy - page 457

The Kingdom of Death
Although not commonly acknowledged, the widespread presence of malaria in the Italian
peninsula during the 19th and 20th centuries is one of the most significant factors in the so-
cial and economic development (or lack of it) of the modern nation. An endemic as well as
an epidemic disease, malaria was so enmeshed in Italian rural society that it was widely re-
garded as the Italian national disease. Even the word itself comes from the Italian mal aria
(bad air), as it was originally thought that the disease was caused by a poisoning of the air
as wet earth dried out during the heat of summer.
The scale of the problem came to light in the decades following Italian unification in
1861. Out of 69 provinces only two were found to be free of malaria; and in a population of
25 million people, at least 11 million were permanently at risk of the disease. Most fam-
ously, Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the founding fathers of modern Italy, lost both his wife,
Anita, and a large number of his troops to the disease. Thus stricken, Garibaldi urged the
newly united nation to place the fight against malaria high on its list of priorities.
In the dawning era of global competition, Italian farming was dangerously backward. As
a predominantly grain-producing economy, it was tragically ironic that all of Italy's most
fertile land was in precisely the zones - coastal plains and river valleys - where malaria
was most intense. To survive, farm workers had no choice but to expose themselves to the
disease. Unfortunately, disease in turn entailed suffering, days of absence and low pro-
ductivity.
More significantly, although malaria ravaged the whole peninsula, it was particularly an
affliction of the south, as well as the provinces of Rome and Grosseto in the centre. Of all
the provinces, six were especially afflicted - Abruzzi, Basilicata, Calabria, Lazio, Puglia
and Sardinia - earning the south the lugubrious epithet 'the kingdom of death'. Giovanni
Battista Grassi (the man who discovered that mosquitos transmit malaria) estimated that the
danger of infection in the south was 10 times greater than in northern Italy.
No issue illustrates the divide between the north and south of the country quite so vividly
as the malaria crisis. The World Health Organisation defines malaria in the modern world
as a disease of poverty that distorts and 'slows a country's economic growth'. In the case of
the Italian south, malaria was a significant factor in the underdevelopment of the region at a
critical time in its history. Malarial fever thrives on exploitative working conditions, sub-
standard housing and diet, illiteracy, war and ecological degradation, all of which Italy's
south had certainly had its fair share of by the early 20th century. As late as 1918, the Min-
istry of Agriculture reported that 'malaria is the key to all the economic problems of the