« The word ‘maremma’ is born with a lowercase ‘m’ because it indicates any low and marshy region near the sea where the tomboli, or dunes, or stretches of coastal land, prevent the water courses from flowing freely into the sea causing it to stagnate. Thus creating marshes, swamps. Not the Maremma, then, but maremma. The largest peninsular maremma, the most famous, the most deadly, the one where malaria raged mercilessly for centuries, was the coastal area of southern Tuscany and western Lazio. So terrible was it that the history of medicine and popular literature linked malaria to its name as the theatre of its shivering atrocities. This territory, the Tuscan-Lazio Maremma took that name as its emblem. It became the Maremma, a region once inhabited by the Etruscans. A region so large that Maremma soon passed into plural. There was talk of Maremme. »
(Aldo Santini)
