Now The Aleppo Pine Produces Pitch, And
Would Still Flourish There, As It Does In The Lowlands Between Taranto
And Metaponto; The Classical Sila Pitch-Trees, However, Could Not Grow
At This Level Any More.
Corroborative evidence can be drawn from
Theocritus, who mentions heath and arbutus as thriving in the marine
thickets near Cotrone - mountain shrubs, nowadays, that have taken refuge
in cooler uplands, together with the wood-pigeon which haunted the same
jungles.
It is true that he hints at marshes near Cotrone, and, indeed,
large tracts of south Italy are described as marshy by the ancients;
they may well have harboured the anopheles mosquito from time
immemorial, but it does not follow that they were malarious.
Much of the healthy physical conditions may have remained into the
Middle Ages or even later; it is strange to read, for example, in
Edrisius, of the pitch and tar that were exported to all parts from the
Bradano river, or of the torrential Sinno that "ships enter this
river - it offers excellent anchorage"; odd, too, to hear of coral
fisheries as late as the seventeenth century at Rocella Ionica, where
the waves now slumber on an even and sandy beach.
But malaria had made insidious strides, meanwhile. Dr. Genovese thinks
that by the year 1691 the entire coast was malarious and abandoned like
now, though only within the last two centuries has man actively
co-operated in its dissemination. So long as the woodlands on the plains
are cut down or grazed by goats, relatively little damage is done; but
it spells ruin to denude, in a country like this, the steep slopes of
their timber. Whoever wishes to know what mischief the goats, those
picturesque but pernicious quadrupeds, can do to a mountainous country,
should study the history of St. Helena. [Footnote: By J. C. Melliss
(London, 1875).] Thanks to the goats, Maltese fever has lately been
introduced into Calabria. Man, with his charcoal-burning, has completed
the disaster. What happens? The friable rock, no longer sustained by
plant-life, crashes down with each thunderstorm, blocks up the valleys,
devastating large tracts of fertile land; it creates swamps in the
lowlands, and impedes the outflow of water to the sea. These ravenous
fiumare have become a feature in Calabrian scenery; underneath one of
the most terrible of them lies the birthplace of Praxiteles. Dry or
half-dry during the warm months, and of formidable breadth, such
torrent-beds - the stagnant water at their skirts - are ideal
breeding-places for the anophelines from their mouth up to a height of
250 metres. So it comes about that, within recent times, rivers have
grown to be the main arteries of malaria. And there are rivers galore in
Calabria. The patriotic Barrius enumerates no of them - Father Fiore,
less learned, or more prudent, not quite so many. Deforestation and
malaria have gone hand in hand here, as in Greece, Asia Minor, North
Africa, and other countries.
Thus year after year, from one cause or another, the conditions have
become more favourable for the disease to do its fatal work.
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