Overview

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 films 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.

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9781032466798

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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.

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