by Rose Facchini
Andrea Bagnato is an architect and writer living in Genoa. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and DAAS in Stockholm, and co-edited the books Rights of Future Generations (Hatje Cantz, 2022) and A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (Columbia University Press, 2019). Rose Facchini interviewed him about his new book Terra Infecta: Disease and the Italian Landscape (Mack, 2025), a counterhistory of the urban and rural landscapes of Italy, charting the disappearance of the Venetian wetlands, urban renewal and displacement in Naples and Matera, and protocols of containment in Milan. It is a narrative study that shows how sanitation and its metaphors were central to Italy’s internal colonialism and how the notion of a pathological “south” opposed to a functional “north” persists there just as elsewhere.
Rose Facchini: What interested you in exploring the topic of disease and uncleanliness in connection with the Italian landscape?
Andrea Bagnato: I became interested in the subject of epidemics as part of my master’s thesis at the Center for Research Architecture (CRA), which was the first seed of this book. I was studying the history of malaria in Italy and found that you could chart the modernization and territorialization of Italy through its progress against malaria. Malaria stands out in comparison to other diseases because it is uniquely related to territory, as it depends on different bodies of water: swamps, marshes, and so on. In the mid-nineteenth century, more or less at the same time in which nation-state efforts were gaining traction, malaria also began to be described as a disease in the more modern sense.
That was the first nucleus of my research, which then led me to study the broader relationship between space and illness or contamination. This turned out to be a lot more complex than the positivist narrative that is often told in architectural history, namely that the West collectively managed to defeat infectious diseases and unhealthy living conditions through urban improvements, concerning street layout or housing, for example. That is a very simplistic narrative that does not match what happened, especially when you expand your focus beyond the urban sphere.
RF: I was especially interested in your case study of Naples, not only because it tugs at my familial heartstrings, but also because of the skewing of individual responsibility that came to dominate the narrative in that area, deflecting attention away from systemic shortcomings. Especially in comparison to the much more recent case study of Lombardy during COVID offered in your introduction, what does that reveal in the broader network of public health, governance, economics, and politics?
AB: During the cholera epidemic of 1884, doctors and social scientists made no attempt to critically study Naples’s administration up to that point—its handling of the drinking water supply, for example—in search of the epidemic’s causes. Cholera was discussed as an individual problem of the poor and blamed on their living conditions. We must contextualize this within late-nineteenth-century economic liberalism, according to which responsibility for everything, but especially poverty, only ever belongs to the individual who experiences it. Poverty was not explained through the social or economic conditions that produce inequality, but simply as misfortune or lack of character, morals, individual initiative, and so on. And architecture was influenced by and participated in this discourse.
I refer to social scientists of that time, such as Pasquale Villari and Matilde Serao, who extensively used metaphors of morality in discussing the conditions of Naples. Villari’s Lettere Meridionali (1878) often shift between explanations according to individual character and national character, and his conception was hugely influential. This is how experts and politicians originally explained away the cholera epidemic. If any alternative readings of the epidemic existed, they would have been in the minority.
RF: Have you ever found any such alternative texts?
AB: Not within Naples. The reason why you would not find something like that is simply because biomedical science, epidemiology, and virology at that time were just taking shape. Doctors and scientists worked within the framework of nineteenth-century liberalism.
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years by Richard J. Evans is a great reconstruction of the 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg. The main point he makes is that the different accepted paradigms used to study cholera were heavily influenced by the politics of their time and place. The theory of waterborne transmission was extremely slow to gain acceptance, since it implied control over drinking water provision, which ran contrary to the economic interests of private water companies in Hamburg and elsewhere, like England. John Snow had famously demonstrated in the 1850s that drinking water transmits cholera, but his ideas did not become mainstream until the end of the century.
It is difficult to find counterfactual voices, at least within the medical field. Throughout my research for this book, I have been trying to hear the voices of the people affected, but there are few, if any, records, so it is difficult to know what the Neapolitans thought of the epidemic or their city’s response to it.
RF: Could you describe the book’s structure?
AB: When I started my research on epidemics a decade ago, it was not obvious to me that there was a contemporary relevance to the subject (although if you were reading certain scientific literature, it was pretty clear that pandemics were very urgent indeed). COVID-19 obviously gave new energy and new impulse to the work I was doing. So I decided to start the book there and then delve into the history to try and unpack the reasons that led to the current state of things, starting with Naples in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
The chapter on Venice covers a very long time span but focuses on the interwar period. In the 1920s and 1930s, the peak of land reclamation overlaps with the fascist understanding of disease control. And then the chapter on Matera revolves around the post-World War II period, which was a moment of very rapid modernization that resulted in the eviction of the inhabitants from the old city.
RF: With Venice, did you primarily want to focus on the historical centrality of ecological knowledge and vulnerabilities, or was there a connection to the present day that you wanted to portray, such as water erosion and climate change?
AB: There is definitely a sense of contemporary relevance. Ecological vulnerabilities are a great way of putting it. Venice is extremely vulnerable today from an environmental perspective, and I argue that the cause is precisely the land reclamation projects that have been ongoing for the past 150 years. Many of the issues we see today around the lagoon—soil erosion, as well as contamination from pesticides and summer droughts—are the legacy of this disgraced policy of reclaiming every last centimeter of swamps and wetlands that existed, to the point that Veneto today has no wetlands left, besides the lagoon itself.
It is interesting to compare this with nearby Emilia-Romagna, because in that region the environmental struggles of the 1970s managed to preserve some of the wetlands, such as those around Comacchio. There was nothing of the sort in Venice, where land reclamation was most successful, both in its practical consequences and its ideological extent, because it remains a widespread opinion that land reclamation was for the better. People seem unable to make the connection between the water shortages they now experience every summer and the disappearance of the bodies of water that once held that water. This cognitive dissonance of sorts made me curious about the historical origins of the present situation.
RF: Is this a continuation of the historical narrative in which bodies of water are associated with diseases like malaria, one that persists even when the alternative (having no water at all) brings its own climate-related problems?
AB: Of course. We should not underestimate the imaginative potential of the narrative that identified bodies of water with illness and infection, and how strong this has been throughout the last two to three centuries. It has been an extraordinarily widespread and successful way of thinking about the landscape. Today, it has pretty much become common sense. Local inhabitants do not question it. Even though they may not explicitly articulate it in these terms, I am quite sure that the reason why people love these flat agricultural landscapesproduced by reclamation (bonifiche) is because they are associated with ideas of hygiene, cleanliness, order, tidiness. Appearing under control, reclaimed landscapes present themselves as everything to which the swamp was supposed to be opposed.
RF: This is a rather ancient concept; it reminds me of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.
AB: Yes, it echoes the way in which the Romans saw cultivation, civilization, and colonization going hand in hand. At the same time, I think it would be a mistake to use this history to explain the modern process of land reclamation, because that history was precisely the modern rationalization: the argument was that land reclamation is right because people have always been doing this ever since ancient Rome. This is simply not true, as there was a shift in scale from 1850 onwards, driven by the expanded use of coal-powered water pumps. It made everything that happened before that incommensurable with everything that happened afterward. The Venetian geographer Letizia Federica Cavallo made this point very clearly in her book Terre, acque, macchine; the amount of land that was reclaimed after 1850 exceeded by several orders of magnitude anything that took place in the previous two millennia.
RF: In your shift from Venice to Matera, there is a continuation of this disregard for autochthonous ecological knowledge through “redevelopment” (risanamento) and the modernization that reshapes the city at the expense of its inhabitants and the environment. What does the rehistoricization of Matera reveal about the dynamics between external authorities that force these efforts onto the population while disregarding traditional practices and knowledge?
AB: By rehistoricization, I mean the current narrative about Matera being a “prehistorical” city. This is how the city is described by tourist guides and in the tourist literature. The use of the adjective is not precise, but it usually means “Neolithic,” or “rupestrian.” By rupestrian, one would assume that we are talking about a place that is as old as Stonehenge, or even Lascaux, but Matera is nothing of the sort. It is a medieval city, and the historians are absolutely clear about this. It is true that the site on which Matera sits, with its natural caves, has been inhabited intermittently since the early Neolithic by groups of people, but they were not permanent settlers. The city itself did not exist until around the eleventh century.
This imaginary retelling of the history of Matera serves, in my opinion, to plaster over the past—in particular, the period of the 1950s and 1960s, when almost every inhabitant was evicted from the Sassi (what is now the historical center of Matera). The rationale for displacing the population was that they lived in caves and thus were outside of modern civilization. On the other hand, proposing to evict people from a “medieval city” would have been quite another thing. You would never think, even at the time, of calling the inhabitants of Siena uncivilized. But Matera became the flashpoint of Southern Italy’s modernization, and so its ancient homes simply had to be let go. And continuing to speak today of Matera as “rupestrian” serves to once again legitimize the violence that modernity exerted upon its inhabitants.
RF: When viewed more broadly, we are overlooking traditional knowledge that could offer significant ecological, environmental, economic, and even political benefits, all in service of a larger political narrative. The fact that Matera has now turned its caves into tourist attractions or Airbnbs, embracing the very narrative it once dismissed, is quite a striking about-face.
AB: The modern project was so all-encompassing and totalizing that it had to erase all the other forms of knowledge that already existed. This is by no means an original argument—I am indebted to the work of many scholars who came before me, from Walter Mignolo to Gayatri Spivak—but looking at these questions within the specific context of rural Southern Italy is particularly fascinating because it reveals how these dynamics have taken place within the context of Europe.
Within and around Europe, there were countless forms and instances of localized knowledge and ecological understanding, which we call “indigenous” in other parts of the world. As you say, now is precisely when we would need such detailed knowledge of water cycles, river flows, and weather. We no longer have that knowledge, and I think there is no real way of recovering it. In this respect, one of the clearest examples included in my book is the history of the communities that were living in the swamps of Veneto, around the Venice Lagoon. They had a very sophisticated understanding of the seasonal water cycles in these swamps, which completely cuts against the grain of everything that we have been told about swamps as dead ecosystems.
But I also encountered a problem when writing about Matera. It is quite intuitive to understand that traditional knowledge about water is important, especially in the context of the ongoing climate crisis. However, making a point about traditional medical knowledge, healing methods, or magical practices is a lot more difficult and controversial. Magic is not something that you can translate to the present day, and that is also the problem with the fascination that people have for shamanic practices around the world. The question that drove the Matera chapter was then to understand why magic worked for the people who practiced it. It is not so much what we can take from it now, because that is not really the point. It is that people resorted to it for thousands of years. This was anthropologist Ernesto de Martino’s central question: he argued that if magic thrived in rural societies for thousands of years, that in itself was evidence of its effectiveness. This is not to say that magic exists, but that it operates at a deep psychological level that was extremely important for those societies.
RF: What do you hope readers take away and internalize from Terra Infecta?
AB: Try to abandon a notion of hygiene, the moral and political qualities associated with it, as something inherently positive. It is one thing to say that we need to wash our hands with soap, which is of course necessary. But it is quite another thing to extend the metaphor of cleaning into a way of organizing society and relationships between people, between social groups, or between societies and their environment. For me, that is one of the toxic legacies of modernity. We are conditioned into using all these metaphors surrounding purity and cleanliness. This is why the responses to COVID-19 were urgent for me to address: many responses had more to do with a generalized, moral understanding of hygiene, of cleansing urban spaces from anything or anyone who did not belong, without much of a relationship with the virus itself.
And in Italy, cities have been changing considerably since the pandemic. There is the usual targeting of migrants or non-white citizens, but there is now a more general targeting of poor citizens who are being expelled not just from the city center but from increasingly broader areas. In Milan, the concept of “red zones,” which first emerged during the pandemic, is now used for areas where the police can stop and search, or even expel, anyone who might represent a generic “threat” or display “anti-social” behaviors, even if no crime is being committed. Needless to say, such areas are those where tourism, consumption, or real-estate speculation dominate. Another example is the drastic curtailing of nightlife that we have seen since the pandemic curfews—the curtailing of those practices and ways of living that by definition escaped control and the logic of capitalist production.
This very brutal process of cleansing the city is new, but its origins can be traced back at least a hundred years to the modern epidemics that I write about. If there is one thing that people can take away, it is hopefully some theoretical tools to confront and oppose these narratives of disinfecting urban and non-urban space.
RF: What do you have in mind for your next project?
AB: I have several ideas growing. One I am really keen to explore is the history of left-wing medical activism in the 1970s that emerged out of the Italian workers’ movement. There was a distinctly medical subset of political activism, in particular by a group called Medicina Democratica, which was nourished by the work of the radical psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. The attempt was to bring medicine outside of its upper-class definition and closer to the workers. I feel that today we lack the tools to articulate a critique of medical knowledge and practice from the left. By understanding how these groups operated, we might gain something that is very much needed.
Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. Her main research focuses on the intersection between Italian studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on climate change and foodways. She also explores how Italy imagines the rapidly changing landscape through speculative fiction and how this correlates in the real world with policymaking and sociocultural adjustments. Her translations have been published in a wide range of journals and by various publishing houses, such as Asymptote, Snuggly Books, and West Branch, and her research appears in Military Medicine.
Featured image: Narrow gauge railways at work during the reclamation of the Agro Pontino area, ca. 1926–1937, Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Agro Pontino, via Wikimedia Commons.
