NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

When just a handful of infections had been confirmed in Italy, the attacks on people of east Asian descent began. Newspapers reported a case in Bologna, where a Chinese-Italian teenager was beaten up by a group of four men. "What are you doing in Italy?" they shouted, "You're bringing us diseases? Get lost, you and your virus." The scene was witnessed by a man, sitting on a nearby bench, who stepped in to help the boy. A report on Bologna Today says he was a Moroccan, and this reminds me that until recently "marocchino" was a catch-all term for any dark-skinned immigrant, a label akin to vu cumprà, whose mock pidgin Italian--"you buy?"--conjured desperate and untrustworthy street hawkers, pests.

There were other attacks. Chinese businesses were boycotted. The Chinese embassy expressed serious concern. A national poster campaign was deemed necessary: "The virus is the enemy, not the Chinese people." In Naples, La Repubblica reported, a bus driver departing from Piazza Garibaldi saw a man with a suitcase--"un uomo orientale," an "oriental" man--waiting to board and accelerated away from the bus stop. A passenger is quoted as saying, "He did the right thing, we don't want the virus here." Calls for a ban on all travel from China were soon followed by calls for a ban on all boats coming from Africa, where no cases of the virus had been reported. As one virus spread around the world, it awoke this old one, too.

Perhaps this is muscle memory. We have always grafted diseases onto select groups of people. During the fourteenth century, the Italians were gripped by the idea that certain people might be intentionally spreading plague. They accused local Jewish communities, which had, they reasoned, always wanted to eradicate Christianity. Men, women and children were burnt alive. In the fifteenth century, syphilis, meanwhile, was, for the Germans, the "French Disease"; for the French, it was carried by Neapolitans (who said it was French). In Turkey, it was the "Christian disease."

In the nineteenth century, British colonists considered cholera to be inherently Indian, a product of an uncivilized way of life. Around the same time, the Americans were blaming it on the Irish and the Italians--destitute, filthy migrants who clambered off ships into crowded harbors looking for work. Their clothes were said to be saturated with sickness. In 1916, Italian immigrants were accused of causing an outbreak of polio in New York and on much of the East Coast, and two years later, along with Jews, they were shunned as bringers of influenza. We have forgotten what it is to be blamed, to be the scapegoat of a society's ills.

"When I was a girl it was malaria everyone was scared of," Nonna told me one day, when I had called to update her on my parents' predicament.

"It was very common," she said, "and very dangerous. You would get a fever and twenty-four hours later you were dead."

I asked if it was malaria that took the first baby Manlio or the twins, but she didn't know. "It's possible. You prayed it wouldn't happen but there were cases. The marshes were not far from here."

Malaria, a sickness in the blood, is ancient but with us still--a historical constant, like the famous mosquito preserved in amber. Though it was eradicated across Europe decades ago, it is rife in Africa. Medicine has not yet found a solution; vaccines work, for a time, and then they don't.

Calls for a ban on all travel from China were soon followed by calls for a ban on all boats coming from Africa, where no cases of the virus had been reported. As one virus spread around the world, it awoke this old one, too.

This shapeshifter has gone by many names: camp fever, ague, intermittent-, swamp- or marsh-fever. Until the turn of the twentieth century, when the female Anopheles mosquito was identified as the cause of infection, the marsh air itself--heavy with the smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetation--was assumed to be poisonous. Mala aria, bad air. Paludismo, swampism, or, I suppose, swampitis.

The beggars and brigands who hid out in these inhospitable water-lands, whose hair and rags were thought to be impregnated with the "seeds" of contagion, were viewed with fear and revulsion. Like Caliban, they could summon "all the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats." Their touch was the kiss of death.

Since Roman times, the plan had been to drain the swamps, to render them inhabitable and agriculturally useful. But successes were few and short-lived. Some say the fall of the Roman Empire can be linked to a particularly bad outbreak of malaria, or "Roman Fever," as it was then known. (I write this a few months after the Italian government collapsed in disagreement over how to handle our own pandemic; the country is now on its sixty-ninth government since the end of the Second World War.)

The Sisyphean struggle against the waters continued for centuries, but the Fascist era into which Nonna was born brought an intensification. The aftermath of the First World War had seen a steep rise in cases of malaria, especially in the Veneto and the Friuli, where fighting had made it impossible to carry out routine maintenance of dredged lands. Quinine tablets were widely distributed, at great cost to the administration.

In 1923, a year into his reign, Mussolini put his characteristic spin on an edict from the late 1800s and declared war on the putrid waters. I wonder if he didn't feel a particular outrage because malaria was a disease that contaminated good Italian blood.

The bonifica delle paludi--the reclamation of the swamps--was the propogandists' dream come true. It was, they said, Italy's panacea: once these wastelands were rendered fertile and buildable, people would no longer need to emigrate in search of a better life. Because, in a sense, the loss of thousands of fine, strong Italians had, for at least half a century, been the nation's most debilitating illness. Not only was the constant population drain a source of embarrassment for the government--not to mention concern: Italians abroad were Italians out of control--but all too often the migrants themselves suffered great indignities. So, a promise was made: Italy's total livable, farmable land would be increased by a third.

Returning to land south of Rome, partly drained by Augustus centuries earlier, a workforce of former soldiers put in place a system of levees and pumps, and, in 1932, on the soil that emerged, Mussolini's architects built Littoria, whose pale stone architecture, simple but ostentatious, with a tall clocktower at its heart, shone like a beacon of cleanliness and renewal.

A few years later, Pontinia was erected nearby, and people, primarily from the Veneto and the Friuli, flocked to the area to make their homes afresh. Strange that this proud Christian nation should forget so readily God's admonishment against building on soft ground.

"That was a good thing he did, you know?" Nonna said. "People don't like to admit it, but it's true."

I say nothing when Nonna says such things. He was let down by those around him. He lost control of the generals. He was misled, people forget. These lines, residua of her formal education, I think, don't seem to fit with the other things I know about her, so mostly, I let them wash over me and try to forget. I can't bring myself to engage because, I confess, I'm frightened of what else might come out.

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