Disguising Disease in Italian Political and Visual Culture

Sharon Hecker is an art historian and curator specializing in Modern and Contemporary Italian art. She is the author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture and co-editor of Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today. Arianna Arisi Rota is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Pavia. She specializes in the history of politics and diplomacy in the nineteenth century, with special attention to generations, and memory-building. Her publications include I piccoli cospiratori, Risorgimento, Il cappello dell’imperatore and Profughi.

1. Denying Disease: An Introduction

2. Diseased Bodies in Early Modern Europe: Picturing Plague Victims

3. Experiencing Transnational Health Challenges: The Safety/Commerce Dilemma in Italy’s Long Nineteenth Century

4. Exporting Epidemics: The Cholera of 1910–11 from Southern Italy to Libya—Denial, Causes and Consequences

5. Medical Mistrust and Contagious Disease in the Italian 1860s: Professor Angelo Scarenzio’s Neglected Therapy for Syphilis

6. The Insufficiency of Science: Skepticism, Polemic and Irony Towards Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italian Literature

7. “Fever Veiled in Mist”: Denying Contagious Diseases in Modern Italian Visual Arts

8. Masking Female Illness: Tuberculosis in Tigre Reale.

9. The Old, the Frail and the Misinformed: Cholera and Aging in Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971)

10. Tuberculosis, Queerness and Luxury Guests: The Hidden Stories of Capri’s Hotel Quisisana

11. Forgetting or Disguising? HIV/AIDS in the Italian Newspapers in the Twenty-First Century

12. The Italian National Health Service in a Time of Crisis: What Were the Responses for the Most Vulnerable People?