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Updated: June 16, 2025
When the prophecy of Garibaldi shall be fulfilled, when the priests, with spades in their hands, shall dig ditches to drain the Pontine marshes, when the monasteries shall be factories, when the whirling wheels of industry shall drown the drowsy and hypocritical prayers, then and not till then, will Italy be great and free.
Bless my soul, Cousin Peter, I hope you have no prospectuses in /your/ pockets; no schemes for draining the Pontine Marshes out of pure love to mankind; no propositions for doubling the income-tax, as a reserve fund for posterity, should our coal-fields fail three thousand years hence. Love of mankind! Rubbish! This comes of living in the country."
Split into peasant proprietorships, this forest would soon become a scientifically irrigated campagna for the cultivation of tomatoes or what not, like the "Colonia Elena," near the Pontine Marshes. The national exchequer would profit, without a doubt. But I question whether we should all take the economical point of view whether it would be wise for humanity to do so.
Great stars shone bright in the spaces between the big beautiful clouds; the murmur of thousands, subdued but never-ceasing, rose on all sides, and very strange was this shrill but drowsy chorus, this voice of the darkness and the desert.... 'The Pontine marshes, said Alice. 'Do you hear the frogs? do you smell the sulphur?
But as we were crossing the Pontine marshes, I noticed on the edge of a canal a shepherd whose flock was passing into a meadow all studded with flowers, and beyond which the sea and Cape Circe were visible. "What a charming picture!" said I to my travelling companion. "This shepherd, these sheep, the meadow, the sea!" "Those sheep are all filthy," he answered; "you ought to see them in England."
He commenced the collection of vast libraries, formed plans for draining the Pontine Marshes, for bringing great supplies of water into the city by an aqueduct, for cutting a new passage for the Tiber from Rome to the sea, and making an enormous artificial harbor at its mouth.
This also accounts for the fact that these men, who did not trust each other previously, became now even more estranged. Hence through Lucius Antonius, his brother, who was tribune, he introduced a measure that considerable land be opened for settlement, among the parcels being the region of the Pontine marshes, which he stated had already been filled and were capable of cultivation.
"The nearly one million of souls of this great city are left to take care of themselves, to be crowded mercilessly by landlords into houses without light, air, or water, and without means of egress in case of fire; and the street filth is allowed to accumulate till the city has become as the famous Pontine Marshes, to breathe whose exhalations is certain disease.
Thus in Italy our memory is refreshed by History and Poetry almost at every step, and the charming situations which recall them, soften all that is melancholy in the past, and seem to preserve an eternal youth. Oswald and Corinne traversed the Pontine marshes a country at once fertile and pestilential, where, with all the fecundity of nature, a single habitation is not to be found.
About five o'clock in the afternoon the diligence made a good stop, in order to allow the passengers to dine. "We will go in and take dinner with the rest," said Mr. George, "and so save the things that we have put up for a moonlight supper on the Pontine Marshes." "Yes," said Rollo, "I shall like that very much.
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