Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) By the time that science had understood 1 that it was actually the insects of the wetlands – specifically, female Anopheles mosquitoes – and not their gases that disseminated the deadly infections, the name had stuck.Ĭredit: Wellcome Collection. In literature, the marshland surrounding Rome has often been described as unwholesome, swathed in noxious, fever-inducing vapours: “bad air” or, in Italian, mal’aria. Sometimes, that has meant erecting barriers. Efforts to stave off the malaria parasite – rather than cure the infection – have usually targeted mosquito control. “Village witchcraft,” says Dr David Soren, a leading scholar of the graveyard – the desperate, pagan propitiations of a newly Christian people overwhelmed by an epidemic killer.
Researchers working on the site, the Necropoli dei Bambini in Lugnano, Italy, 70 miles north of Rome, describe the ritual objects as evidence of helpless terror. One child would be unearthed more than 1,500 years later with a stone the size of a large bird’s egg still wedging the jaw bones wide open: a “vampire burial”, according to archaeologists, who believe the stone was intended to keep the dead from rising and spreading disease. Around the little bodies, they arranged strange talismans: the headless skeletons of several puppies, a raven’s talon. In the middle fifth century CE on a hill overlooking the Tiber, a community hastily buried 49 children, tucking sometimes five or six infants into one grave.
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