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

This chapter focuses on the dilemma between the protection of public health and the protection of trade and commerce, which was experienced early on in a post-Napoleonic Europe facing pandemic waves of cholera. In a time when the metaphors of contagion and of cordons sanitaires were used by many European rulers to fight the spreading of liberalism and revolution, the challenge brought by cholera and later by typhus and yellow fever engaged official narratives, while a few critical voices argued for courageous though unpopular choices. This context offers an under-investigated perspective to monitor in the Italian case the clash between the political choice of minimizing or disguising the risks of infection and the sensibility of health officers and scientists involved in pioneering research activities. The dilemma puzzled policymakers and renowned experts of public health from the 1830s, during a fierce outbreak of cholera in the Papal States, up to the 1865–67 wave of cholera in the recently unified Kingdom of Italy, and yet again during Italy’s first jubilee in 1911. Through primary sources, such as parliamentary debates and scientific journals, this chapter aims to investigate how a modernizing Italy reacted when confronted by invisible, global enemies.