Le pandemie in Italia tra cronaca, letteratura e storia

The epidemic wave of recent years has forced us to come to terms with the limits of our security. We have been confronted with a vulnerability that can always re-emerge in new forms, making us feel closer to the dramas we went through, with far fewer possibilities of defence, in the centuries left behind. The impact with the crisis is always fixed in the memory: it becomes a matter of chronicle, on which powers and institutions intervene, a plot of narratives that can become literature and history. The anthology we present retraces the most significant moments of this uninterrupted dialogue between diseases spread by contagion and the community of human actors. From Boccaccio's plague, passing through Guicciardini, Federico Borromeo, Muratori, Verri, Parini, Manzoni, De Amicis and other authors, we are led to the repercussions of the epidemics of smallpox, cholera and Spanish flu. The book concludes with an initial overview of the narrative repercussions of the Covid-19 epidemic, projecting us into the heart of an event whose effects cannot be forgotten because of their weight and global character.