Pontine Marshes

American  

plural noun

1. an area in W Italy, SE of Rome: formerly marshy, now drained.

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Pontine Marshes British  

/ ˈpɒntaɪn /

plural noun

1. Italian name: Agro Pontino.  an area of W Italy, southeast of Rome: formerly malarial swamps, drained in 1932–34 after numerous attempts since 160 _bc had failed

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Example Sentences

For hundreds of years up to the fifth century ad, the malarial Pontine Marshes around Rome staved off attacks by Carthaginians, Germanic tribes and Huns, yet weakened Roman citizens.

From Nature

For starters, Winegard argues that malaria took down King Tut circa 1323 BC, and that ancient Rome would never have become a forceful presence had it not been surrounded by the Pontine Marshes, 310 mosquito-riddled square miles of “fear and horror” that discouraged invaders.

From Los Angeles Times

Florence Nightingale called the Pontine Marshes, near Rome, “the Valley of the Shadow of Death”; a German missionary visiting the southern United States wrote that it was “in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital”; a Mayan survivor of post-Columbus epidemics remembered, “Great was the stench of death. . . . All of us were thus. We were born to die!”

From The New Yorker

Which argument leads us to the idea that reflooding the Pontine Marshes or the Fens would lead to an increase in the wealth of the nation.

From Forbes

Your birthday itself I passed in a singular but delightful manner, though I could not write, having neither pens nor ink; in fact, I was in the very middle of the Pontine Marshes.

From Project Gutenberg