This volume contains a collection of articles organised around the theme of contagion both as representation and as historical event in Italy, beginning with the Black Death of 1348 and ending with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is divided roughly evenly between the examination of historical events and phenomena – such as the search for a treatment for syphilis (in a chapter by Paolo Mazzarello) and the 1910–11 cholera epidemic in Libya (Gabriele Bassi) – and representational strategies in art, film and literature, such as paintings that feature coffins during the Black Death (Louise Marshall) and the depiction of tuberculosis in the literary and film versions of Tigre reale (Catherine Ramsey-Portolano).
The book addresses an important and timely topic. Yet there is a disjunction between several of the chapters and the book’s overarching premise that comprises the volume’s singular deficit. Specifically, many if not most of the contributions, though strong in and of themselves, do not conform to the introduction’s emphasis on intentional disguise in the management of contagion. The idea that Italian ‘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 nations’ healthy body in Italy and its colonies’ (p. 2) is not totally convincing. Although it is possible that ‘the notion of disease clashed with the official narrative of an emerging modernized urban setting, challenging a myth of political stability and vigor’ (p. 3), it is not necessarily the case that ‘downplaying, disguise and outright denial’ (p. 2) must follow, nor that chronic diseases were either ‘simply forgotten or intentionally disguised’ (p. 11). On the contrary, as the chapter contributions show, a more nuanced approach is required. Cultural amnesia can be unintentional. The process of therapeutic discovery involves inevitable missteps. New epidemics happen in real time and, thus, responses to them are in constant evolution as new information emerges. The metaphorisation or stylisation of illness in an aesthetic object does not automatically require comparative recourse to an actual historical referent. In short, it looks as if the editors might have started with a historiographical hypothesis that was circulated to the contributors, some of whom confirmed this hypothesis in their pieces, while others did not. Then, instead of changing the hypothesis or recalibrating the introduction, the editors proceeded following their original convictions. Confirmation of this can be seen in the editors’ syntheses of the single chapters, syntheses that privilege elements of intentional deception.
Other, smaller, vexations: the volume is uneven in terms of pitch, and one otherwise very valid piece is somewhat orphaned – namely, the chapter by Italian sociologist Marco Terraneo. His detailed examination of inequalities in the Italian national health system, with its emphasis on economic and regional distinctions in the level of care provided to the most vulnerable, is of a different order to the other contributions.
Beyond that, the chapters offer nuanced looks at their objects of inquiry. Both of the editors’ contributions are noteworthy and, not incidentally, reflect the volume’s overarching thesis. Historian Arianna Arisi Rota writes convincingly on the difficulty of implementing effective public health measures while protecting and nurturing regional and international commerce, and art historian Sharon Hecker cogently examines cases in which the depiction of illness in art met with either critical censure or praise as a function of the piece’s subject matter more than its aesthetic value. Also deserving of particular mention in this regard are Gabriele Bassi’s piece on cholera in Libya, the management of which sometimes meant denial for patriotic and wartime reasons, and Marco Rovinello’s chapter on HIV/AIDS, which, he argues, was decidedly not disguised but repackaged.
As far as aesthetic objects go, it is almost as though the premise of the book assumes that realism is the only form of disclosure; the rest is disguise, rejection, denial. But for many contributors, it is metaphor that matters. Catherine Ramsey-Portolano persuasively contends that, whether the diseased body resembles a spiritualised beauty ideal, a metaphor for corruption or sensuality, or something else altogether, the point is the rejection of scientific discourse in favour of an exploration of dominant contemporary conceptions about femininity. Federica Massia, too, reviews three different approaches to the medical turn in late nineteenth-century Italian literature. Louise Marshall’s engaging examination of Italian Renaissance paintings depicting the plague points to strategies that run the gamut from structuring absences to terrifying natural and supernatural presences. Brendan Hennessey’s intriguing argument about the slippage in Luchino Visconti’s work between old age and disease illuminates the question of the depiction of suffering as social stigma. Ewa Kawamura’s history of the shape-shifting of the Hotel Quisisana points – like Mazzarello’s and Bassi’s chapters – to the idea that there are no road maps; rather, individual agents and institutions figure things out as they go, perpetually modifying identities and trajectories as current context requires.
In other words, to attribute exclusively or even predominantly oppressive, dishonest or corrupt motives to rejection or denial – as the book’s introduction suggests – is to miss out on what the volume in fact demonstrates brilliantly: the myriad uses (and abuses) to which contagion and disease have been put both discursively and materially.
