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The author outlines parasitologic features of human plasmodia and Anopheles, the public health and human aspects of this protozoan infection. Starting from the etymology of the words "mal' aria," the author describes a brief but proven history of social importance, dwelling not only on the clinical, medical or scientific aspects. In other words, the author dwells upon the literary, the customary, as well as on the historic and cultural aspects, with special attention to the significance of the popular importance of this problem in Italy.

The hippocratic treatise Airs, waters and places is a book for travelling practitioners, explaining them all they have to check when they arrive in a new unknown place. According to the author of this manual, one of the most frequent causes of diseases is the bad quality of environmental air. Admitting this theory, the medical man could not imagine that diseases might be transmitted by contagion. Yet vets had always known about contagion among herds and flocks. Christian literature which used so frequently the metaphor of the good sheperd and the sick sheep might have drawn doctors' attention and parallelized the situation among animals and that among human beings. The authority of the so-called father of medicine was so powerful that this did not happen and that contagionists and anticontagionists would quarrel for ages.

Authors examines the paleopathologic evidences of the atmosferic pollution in ancient time, point out the attention on two principal findings: pulmonar anthracosis and lead exposure. Pulmonar anthracosis is present in many mummified bodies and was due to the deposition on the pulmonar alveoli of carbon particles coming from the combustion of oils or vegetables for illumination, cooking or heating. Lead atmosferic pollution was very high between V century B.C. and III century A.D. in the North emisphere, in consequence to the impressive quantity of lead produced by Greek and Roman metallurgic technology (perhaps 80,000 metric tons per year around the start of I century AD). Cumulative lead fallout to the Greenland Ice Sheet during these eight centuries was as high as 15 percent of that caused by the massive use of lead alkyl additives in gasoline since the 1930s. Finally, the high atmosferic lead concentration caused a high exposure of humans to the lead: in fact paleopathologists, have clarely demonstrated a high quantity of lead concentration in the human bone dated to the period between III century B.C. and VI century AD circa.

According to the Hippocratic medicine remittent and intermittent fevers were caused by bad air (mal'aria) and bad water of marshes, which produced miasmata affecting people living near these environments. This wrong theory was remarkably stable and persistent until the end of the last century, being in fact quite adequate to decribe the epidemiology of malaria in Mediterranean areas, where the transmission of the parasite depended on mosquitoes breeding mainly in marsh ecosystems. The theory was even reinforced with the spreading of severe malaria due to Plasmodium falciparum (more closely associated with warm marshy areas) and when a specific remedy, quinine, came into the picture, improving the distinction of malaria from other fever diseases. After the discovery of the true causes of malaria infection and transmission, scientific medicine developed completely new definitions of malarious environments based on their stratification in terms of transmission risk and several parameters were introduced which provide a measure of the vectorial capacity. This paper focus on the most relevant historical events that have brought to the present knowledge of malarious environments, examining at the same time the effectiveness and limits of the Hippocratic view on the etiology of malaria.