ABSTRACT
A seventeenth-century chronicle penned by the Sicilian humanist Filippo Paruta bears witness to the island's global entanglements, made material through the viral spread of contagion and the equally insidious creep of colonialism. In a series of entries detailing the final decades of the fifteenth century, Paruta describes a plague that devastated the population of Messina, which was believed to have been carried to the island by infected falcons imported from North Africa. On the very next page, we read of an outbreak of a “beastly disease” (fiera malatia)—syphilis—said to have been brought to the regions of the Kingdom of Naples by Spanish soldiers returning from the Americas. Sandwiched between these grim references to the “Levant” and the “Indies” is an account of a curious ceremony held in Paruta's native Palermo in 1489, in which this ever-expanding contemporary world disappears, for a moment, into the shadow of the distant past.
