AnimalFarm Seminar Series: Terra Infecta

Southern Italy is now a glamorous tourist destinations, but was long portrayed as a place of disease, uncleanliness, and barbarity. This narrative study shows how sanitation and its metaphors were constitutive of Italy’s internal colonialism, and how the notion of a pathological “south” opposed to a functional “north” persists there just as elsewhere. Terra Infecta is a counterhistory of the urban and rural landscapes of Italy. It charts the disappearance of the Venetian wetlands, histories of urban renewal and displacement in Naples and Matera, and protocols of containment in Milan during Covid-19. It is at once a critique of modern hygiene, and a collection of revelatory moments of community, healing, and resistance.

Terra Infecta book