A discussion of the history of the Campagna would probably be regarded as culpably incomplete without at least a reference to the causes that have led to the solitude and desolation of the region. There can be little doubt that in the days of the Empire the plain was thickly peopled and well cultivated. It could not have been the fever-stricken place which it has since become. The wealthy Romans were delighted to escape from the tumult of town to their quiet and healthy retreats in the country where, amid the pleasures and occupations of their farms, they could spend the hottest, and what is now the most insalubrious, season of the year. Yet there would seem to have been even then malarious tracts in the Campagna. Cicero boasts of the healthiness of Rome, compared with the pestilential character of the surrounding district. The porousness of the tuff all over the country, as I have above remarked, allows a large proportion of the rain to sink at once under ground, instead of flowing off into runnels and brooks. The water finds its way again to the surface at lower levels, either in the form of springs or oozing from the soil. In the hollows where the drainage accumulates, stagnant poolsand marshes arise, which become the great nurseries of malaria. In the most flourishing days of Rome, when the whole surface of the Campagna was populous and in full cultivation, attention was alive to the importance of drainage. Probably many of the swampy tracts, whence mosquitoes now swarm, were then dry and turned over by the plough or spade. The general processes of agriculture prevented the accumulation of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. But with the fall of Rome and the devastation of the Campagna by successive hordes of barbarians, the villas fell into ruins, the inhabitants were in great measure extirpated, the farms remained untilled, the soil was left untouched, the water was allowed once more to gather and the vegetation to decay in the hollows. In the well-known words of Gibbon, 'the Campagna of Rome was speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness in which the land is barren, the waters are impure and the air is infectious.' Fever, which probably always found a home in various parts of the district, now stalked everywhere, until at the end of the twelfth century, when the population of the city had fallen to no more than 35,000 souls, Pope Innocent III. could declare that it was difficult to find there a man of forty years of age and hardly possible to meet with one of sixty.
No one will dispute that the sole, or at least the chief, cause of this long-continued depopulation is to be found in the prevalence of malarious fever. Nor, since modern science has so clearly revealed the nature and source of this decimating malady, can there be any hesitation as to the more important steps that must betaken to restore the region to healthfulness and fertility. Schemes are now in contemplation to reclaim these wastes to cultivation, and to repeople them with an industrious peasantry. While every lover of Italy will rejoice over the successful accomplishment of such a beneficent reform, those who have known the Campagna in the days of its desolation, and have found in its weird loneliness and quiet beauty, in its monuments and memories of the past, an inexpressible delight, will perhaps be pardoned if they regretfully look back upon another of the charms of Rome which shall then have passed away.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
FOOTNOTE:[103]International Quarterly, June 1904.
[103]International Quarterly, June 1904.
[103]International Quarterly, June 1904.
Transcriber's Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
Transcriber's Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.