This book, perhaps like many works of history, began as much by accident as by design. The idea for it originated through research on an entirely unrelated topic – the violent political history of the anarcho-syndicalist movement among the farm workers of the South of Italy during the height of the Liberal regime between 1900 and the First World War. Field work for that purpose revealed frequent references to Asiatic cholera during the summer of 1910 and the social responses it provoked, which included riots, assaults on physicians, a xenophobic fury against gypsies, mass flight and the revival of religiosity and superstition. These events were intriguing and unexpected in a modern industrial state in the twentieth century. Furthermore, it rapidly began to appear that the disease offered as illuminating a means of examining the structure of southern Italian society as the original political history on which I had embarked. My interest grew further with the realization that, despite the tumults that marked its passage, the epidemic had never been the subject of study by a modern historian, and was almost totally ignored in general histories of the period. The intention of writing a history of the epidemic of 1910 in Italy began to take firmer shape.

Recent writings on Asiatic cholera made the idea of a study of a twentiethcentury epidemic still more appealing. There is an extensive international literature on cholera, with monographs on Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, Russia, Sweden and the United States. But there is a serious imbalance in the field with an overwhelming emphasis on the dramatic first European experiences with the disease, and almost nothing at all on Italy.