History - Southern Italy - page 458

South'. Against this background of regional inequality, the fever became an important
metaphor deployed by meridionalisti (southern spokesmen) such as Giustino Fortunato
(1848-1932) and Francesco Nitti (1868-1953) to describe the plight of the south and to
demand redress. Nitti attributed the entirety of southern backwardness to this single factor.
Between 1944 and 1946 the German Wehrmacht systematically sabotaged the pumping systems that
drained Italy's marshes and confiscated quinine from the Department of Health. The ensuing malaria epi-
demic proved as deadly as any WWI ground offensive.
Between 1900 and 1907, the Italian parliament passed a series of laws establishing a
national campaign - the first of its kind in the world - to eradicate or at least control the
disease. But it was to take the best part of half a century to bring malaria under control, as
two world wars and the Fascist seizure of power in 1922 were to overwhelm domestic
policies, causing the program to stall and then collapse entirely amid military defeat and
occupation.
Final victory against the disease was only achieved following the end of WWII, when
the government was able to re-establish public-health infrastructures and implement a
five-year plan which included the use of a new pesticide, DDT, to eradicate malaria. The
designation of 'malarial zone' was only officially lifted from the entire peninsula in 1969.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the acknowledged classic work on the
subject of the empire's darker days. Try the abridged single-volume version.