THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 
427 
maintenance of numerous domestic fires, would restore it to its 
ancient healthfulness.* In accordance with these views, set¬ 
tlers were invited from various parts of Italy, from Greece, 
and, after the accession of the Lorraine princes, from that 
country also, and colonized in the Maremme. To strangers 
coming from soils and sides so unlike those of the Tuscan 
marshes, the climate was more fatal than to the inhabitants of 
the neighboring districts, whose constitutions had become in 
some degree inured to the local influences, or who at least 
knew better how to guard against them. The consequence 
very naturally was that the experiment totally failed to pro¬ 
duce the desired effects, and was attended with a great sacri¬ 
fice of life and a heavy loss to the treasury of the state. 
The territory known as the Tuscan Maremma, ora marl- 
tima , or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used 
—lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and com¬ 
prises about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square 
miles, or 320,000 acres, are plain and marsh including 45,500 
acres of water surface, and about 290,000 acres are forest. 
One of the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the 
height of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are 
healthy, the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at 
some points at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with 
the exception of a few localities favorably situated on the sea- 
coast, are in a high degree pestilential. The fixed population 
is about 80,000, of whom one sixth live on the plains in the 
winter and about one tenth in the summer. Nine or ten thou¬ 
sand laborers come down from the mountains of the Maremma 
and the neighboring provinces into the plain, during the latter 
season, to cultivate and gather the crops. 
Out of this small number of inhabitants and strangers, 
35,619 were ill enough to require medical treatment between 
the 1st of June, 1840, and the 1st of June, 1841, and more 
than one half the cases were of intermittent, malignant, gas- 
* Macchiavelli advised the Government of Tuscany “ to provide that 
men should restore the wholesomeness of the soil by cultivation, and 
purify the air by fires.”— Salvagnoli, Memorie , p. 111. 
