Terra Infecta
A Moving Border
Rights of Future Generations
Arrivederci ad Arborea
The Quantified Home
Vulnerable Beings
Medical Borders
Al Masha + Difficult Heritage
The Interior Inside Out
MACK Books, 2025
978-1-917651-24-0
12.5 x 18 cm, 304 pp.
Praise for Terra Infecta:
‘This is architectural investigation at its very best. Andrea Bagnato deconstructs and reconstructs Italian history – from the scale of landscape and epidemics to that of the body – not as a nation-building process but as an internal process of settler colonialism.’
—Eyal Weizman
‘A very good analysis of the way landscapes and cities in Italy are associated with illness and how political interventions in the name of sanitation and hygiene are in fact about class. Andrea Bagnato reminds us how resistance is organised.’
—Françoise Vergès
‘A thrilling journey … written with rare clarity of thought and a political vision that is at once compassionate and moral in the best sense. … Bagnato pulls no punches.’
—Il Sole 24 Ore
‘Sharp and very much needed’
—Wu Ming 1
‘Drawing on a vast array of sources, this book charts the annihilation of lifeworlds of Italy’s rural and urban poor with extraordinary sensitivity. It shows how complex webs of coexistence between humans, animals, and their environments were systematically re-ordered through the exertion of a new epidemiological power over the social body. In recounting forms of resistance to this violence, it calls on us to envision new relations to land, liberated from the compulsion to ‘improve’ and grounded in understandings of our mutual interdependence.’
—Adrian Lahoud
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Southern Italy is now a glamorous tourist destinations, but was long portrayed as a place of disease, uncleanliness, and barbarity. This narrative study shows how sanitation and its metaphors were constitutive of Italy’s internal colonialism, and how the notion of a pathological “south” opposed to a functional “north” persists there just as elsewhere.
Terra Infecta is a counterhistory of the urban and rural landscapes of Italy. It charts the disappearance of the Venetian wetlands, histories of urban renewal and displacement in Naples and Matera, and protocols of containment in Milan during Covid-19. It is at once a critique of modern hygiene, and a collection of revelatory moments of community, healing, and resistance.
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Terra Infecta is based on long-term research initiated in 2016, which has also resulted in lectures, workshops, articles, and exhibitions. The research was previously supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Graham Foundation, FBSR, and the Canadian Center for Architecture.
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