1st Edition
Disguising Disease in Italian Political and Visual Culture From Post-Unification to COVID-19
Although considered an isolated event, the Italian government’s initial resistant response to COVID-19 has deep historical roots. This is the first interdisciplinary book to critically examine the ongoing phenomenon of disguising contagious disease in Italy from Unification to the present.
The book explores how governments, public opinion, social entities, and cultural production have avoided or sublimated contagion during cholera, typhoid, syphilis, malaria, HIV and COVID-19 to impose narratives of the nation’s healthy body in Italy and its colonies. Examples range from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Capri that masked as a luxury hotel and hideaway for queer couples, to an obscure but talented professor who found a new cure for syphilis; from denial of disease in governmental actions to sublimated representations in Italian art, literature, and film such as Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, to a sociological study of the need to include fragile figures based on the lessons of COVID-19.
Intended for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of medicine, political and cultural history, and Italian studies, this volume shows how contagious diseases clash with the official narrative of emerging modernized urban settings and challenge the desire for political and economic stability.
1. Denying Disease: An Introduction
Sharon Hecker and Arianna Arisi Rota
2. Diseased Bodies in Early Modern Europe: Picturing Plague Victims
Louise Marshall
3. Experiencing Transnational Health Challenges: The Safety/Commerce Dilemma in Italy’s Long Nineteenth Century
Arianna Arisi Rota
4. Exporting Epidemics: The Cholera of 1910–11 from Southern Italy to Libya—Denial, Causes and Consequences
Gabriele Bassi
5. Medical Mistrust and Contagious Disease in the Italian 1860s: Professor Angelo Scarenzio’s Neglected Therapy for Syphilis
Paolo Mazzarello
6. The Insufficiency of Science: Skepticism, Polemic and Irony Towards Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italian Literature
Federica Massia
7. “Fever Veiled in Mist”: Denying Contagious Diseases in Modern Italian Visual Arts
Sharon Hecker
8. Tigre reale: Masking Tuberculosis in Print and on Screen
Catherine Ramsey-Portolano
9. The Old, the Frail and the Misinformed: Cholera and Aging in Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971)
Brendan Hennessey
10. Tuberculosis, Queerness and Luxury Guests: The Hidden Stories of Capri’s Hotel Quisisana
Ewa Kawamura
11. Forgetting or Disguising? HIV/AIDS in the Italian Newspapers in the Twenty-First Century
Marco Rovinello
12. The Italian National Health Service in a Time of Crisis: What Were the Responses for the Most Vulnerable People?
Marco Terraneo
Biography
Sharon Hecker is an art historian and curator specializing in Modern and Contemporary Italian art. She is the author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture and co-editor of Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today.
Arianna Arisi Rota is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Pavia. She specializes in the history of politics and diplomacy in the nineteenth century, with special attention to generations, and memory-building. Her publications include I piccoli cospiratori; Risorgimento; Il cappello dell’imperatore; and Profughi.
