Disguising Disease in Italian Political and Visual Culture

From Post-Unification to COVID-19

Sharon Hecker, Arianna Arisi Rota

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781040121863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Denying Disease: An Introduction
• 2 Diseased Bodies in Early Modern Europe: Picturing Plague Victims
• 3 Experiencing Transnational Health Challenges: The Safety/Commerce Dilemma in Italy's Long Nineteenth Century
• 4 Exporting Epidemics: The Cholera of 1910–11 from Southern Italy to Libya – Denial, Causes and Consequences
• 5 Medical Mistrust and Contagious Disease in the Italian 1860s: Professor Angelo Scarenzio's Neglected Therapy for Syphilis
• 6 The Insufficiency of Science: Skepticism, Polemic and Irony Toward Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italian Literature
• 7 “Fever Veiled in Mist”: Denying Contagious Diseases in Modern Italian Visual Arts
• 8 Masking Female Illness in Tigre Reale: Tuberculosis from Print to Screen
• 9 The Old, the Frail and the Misinformed: Cholera and Aging in Visconti's Death in Venice (1971)
• 10 Tuberculosis, Queerness and Luxury Guests: The Hidden Stories of Capri's Hotel Quisisana
• 11 Forgetting or Disguising? HIV/AIDS in the Italian Newspapers in the Twenty-First Century
• 12 The Italian National Health Service in a Time of Crisis: What Were the Responses for the Most Vulnerable People?
• Index