THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 611 



The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been an 

 unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the Romans, 

 but it certainly became so within a few centuries after that event. 

 This was a natural consequence of the neglect or wanton destruc- 

 tion of the public improvements, especially the hydraulic works 

 in which the Etruscans were so skilful, and of the felling of 

 the upland forests, to satisfy the demand for wood at Rome, for 

 domestic, industrial and military purposes. After the downfall 

 of the Roman empire, the incursions of the barbarians, and then 

 feudahsm, foreign domination, intestine wars, and temporal and 

 spiritual tyrannies, aggravated still more cruelly the moral and 

 physical evils which Tuscany and the other Italian. States were 

 doomed to suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief 

 respites during the whole period of modern history. The Ma- 

 remma was ah*eady proverbiaUy unhealthy in the time of Dante, 

 who refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty 

 tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of confine- 

 ment in its territory, as a slow but certain mode of execution. 

 Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the inter- 

 ference of private rights,* prevented the adoption of measures to 

 remove it, and the growing poHtical and commercial unportance 

 of the large towns in more healthful locahties absorbed the atten- 

 tion of Government, and deprived the Maremma of its just share 

 in the systems of physical improvement which were successfully 

 adopted in interior and Northern Italy. 



* In Catholic countries, the discipline of the church requires a meagre diet 

 at certain seasons, and as fish is not flesh, there is a great demand for that 

 article of food at those periods. For the convenience of monasteries and their 

 patrons, and as a source of pecuniary emolument to ecclesiastical establish- 

 ments and sometimes to lay proprietors, great numbers of artificial fish-ponds 

 were created during the Middle Ages. They were generally shallow pools 

 formed by damming up the outlet of marshes, and they were among the most 

 fruitful sources of endemic disease, and of the peculiar malignity of the epi- 

 demics which so often ravaged Europe in those centuries. These ponds, in 

 religious hands, were too sacred to be infringed upon for sanitary purposes, 

 and when belonging to powerful lay lords they were almost as inviolable. 

 The rights of fishery were a standing obstacle to every proposal of hydraulic 

 improvement, and to this day large and fertile districts in Southern Europe 

 remain sickly and almost unimproved and uninhabited, because the draining 

 of the ponds upon them would reduce the income of proprietors who derive 

 large profits by supplying the faithful, in Lent, with fish, and with various 



