Andrea Bagnato, Terra Infecta: Disease and the Italian Landscape – Mack, January 2026

Ranging from Italian unification to the aftershocks of Covid-19, and drawing on architectural records, medical history, and the author’s own travels, Terra Infecta reveals the lived realities of grand schemes, traces of vanished communities, and forgotten histories of collective organisation and resistance.

In Terra Infecta, Andrea Bagnato tells an unfamiliar story about a well-known place. Since the early days of tourism, the cities and landscapes of Italy have been bywords for beauty and grandeur. But, at home and abroad, the same places have also been haunted by associations with disease and uncleanliness, often more to do with politics than conditions on the ground.

In this gripping narrative study, Bagnato shows how the modern quest for sanitation shaped Italy’s urban and rural landscapes, propelling major transformations from the draining of the wetlands around Venice, to demolitions and replanning in Naples, to the expulsion of the inhabitants of ancient Matera. He argues that current north–south inequalities are founded on spurious medical narratives, and focuses on the real impact on the people caught in their ministrations.

Diseased and Reclaimed Landscapes: An Interview with Andrea Bagnato at JHI blog

Andrea Bagnato is an architect and writer living in Genoa. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and DAAS in Stockholm, and co-edited the books Rights of Future Generations (Hatje Cantz, 2022) and A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change(Columbia University Press, 2019). Rose Facchini interviewed him about his new book Terra Infecta: Disease and the Italian Landscape (Mack, 2025), a counterhistory of the urban and rural landscapes of Italy, charting the disappearance of the Venetian wetlands, urban renewal and displacement in Naples and Matera, and protocols of containment in Milan. It is a narrative study that shows how sanitation and its metaphors were central to Italy’s internal colonialism and how the notion of a pathological “south” opposed to a functional “north” persists there just as elsewhere.