PROLOGUE: THE INVASION OF APULIA

By the time of the renewed threat to Naples in 1910, the local and national authorities had long anticipated the return of Asiatic cholera. The sixth pandemic began its ravages in 1899 in Bengal. It then moved relentlessly westward along two established bacterial highways. To the north the disease followed the trade routes to the Punjab, Afghanistan and Persia. Crossing the Caspian Sea, it journeyed up the Volga to Moscow and the west. At the same time the cholera moved in a second, more southerly direction, travelling overland to Bombay and Madras; then by sea to Ceylon and Jeddah. It then accompanied the pilgrims to Mecca in 1902 and dispersed with them across the Red Sea to Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa.

The Department of Public Health in the Ministry of the Interior anxiously followed this westward movement and sounded the alarm in 1904, when cholera invaded the Russian Empire and developed into a full-scale epidemic. In the summer of 1905 the Ministry recorded outbreaks in Poland, Germany and the Hapsburg Empire, and observed that Italy was in clear danger. The authorities identified the Austrian border, Apulia and the ports of Naples and Genoa as particularly vulnerable. In September 1905 the Ministry of the Interior declared that Italy was now on a sanitary war-footing because the arrival of the disease on Italian soil was ‘not just probable, but imminent’.

As the Ministry had feared, the Vibrio cholerae reached Italy in the summer of 1910, claiming its first victims on the Adriatic coastline of Apulia that the authorities had identified as a locality of special risk.