426 
THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 
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 Maremma 
was already proverbially unhealthy in the time ot Dante, who 
refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty 
tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of con¬ 
finement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode ol execu¬ 
tion. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the 
interference of private rights, “ prevented the adoption of meas¬ 
ures to remove it, and the growing political and commercial 
importance of the large towns in more healthful localities 
absorbed the attention of Government, and deprived the Ma¬ 
remma of its just share in the systems of physical improvement 
which were successfully adopted in interior and Northern Italy. 
Before any serious attempts were made to drain or fill up 
the marshes of the Maremme, various other sanitary exper¬ 
iments were tried. It was generally believed that the insa¬ 
lubrity of the province was the consequence, not the cause, 
of its depopulation, and that, if it were once densely inhab¬ 
ited, the ordinary operations of agriculture, and especially the 
* 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 
establishments 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 epidemics which so often ravaged Europe in those cen¬ 
turies. 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 species of waterfowl which, 
though very fat, are, ecclesiastically speaking, meagre. 
