The horrors and hardships of Mussolini's 'new frontier' in the Fascist regime's reclaimed swamplands are brought back to life in a new show south of Rome.
Pictures of malaria victims, old packets of medicines and contemporary research on the killer disease show what the hopeful settlers from Italy's far north found waiting for them in the promised land.
"The documents cover the period from 1932, when the swamps had just been filled in, to 1938 when Mussolini put on a major exhibition at Rome's Circus Maximus to show doctors were up with the most recent findings on the disease," said the chief architect of Pontinia, one of the towns founded in the '30s on what for centuries had been swamp.
The official, Luigi Caponera, said the show at Pontinia's Malaria Museum "also sheds light on some of the traditional remedies, used by swamp people for thousands of years, which were adopted when the regime's anti-malaria campaigns proved less than effective".
Illiterate swamp dwellers had shared the Pontine marshes - which are mentioned by several Ancient Roman writers including Horace and Ovid - with only the buffalo and other hardy species since the remote past.
Thousands of people died from malaria during Mussolini's landmark project to bring back to life a dead marsh that had defied the efforts of emperors and popes.
Many of the settlers were from the northern Veneto region - peasants lured by the promise of a free farm.
However, with the advent of new anti-malarial drugs and fumigants on the eve of the Second World War, the disease was quickly wiped out from the area which then became a burgeoning agricultural and industrial zone.
Despite the often grim reality, propaganda pictures from the early '30s promoted an image of a blossoming farmland from which wheat rolled out to feed Italy's growing population.
One of the most famous newsreel snaps shows a bare-chested Duce loading sheaves of corn onto a harvester.
Mussolini commissioned a mural of this famous stunt to hang in his luxury Rome home, Villa Torlonia.
Littoria, the centre of the new province, was a showcase New Town in the 30s, receiving politicians and urban planners from all over Europe.
After the war its name, which came from the Fascist (and Ancient Roman) symbol of bundled rods of power, was changed to Latina after the old Latin tribes in the area which were conquered by Rome.
The other towns in the region - Pontina, Aprilia and Sabaudia - retained their prewar names.
The area was shunned by Italy's new anti-Fascist elite but the area around the seaside resort of Sabaudia became an intellectual enclave for writers centred on Alberto Moravia, one of Italy's top 20th century novelists.
The towns' once-reviled urban landscapes, with their clean, spare lines and ample green spaces, have been re-evaluated in recent years.
The Pontinia show runs until May 27.
