Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy. G. Geltner. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. x + 260 pp. $65. - Vivere la città: Roma nel Rinascimento. Ivana Ait and Anna Esposito, eds. Studi del Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo–Sapienza Università di Roma 17. Rome: Viella, 2020. 292 pp. €30

The recent US presidential election underscored deep divides between city and countryside in modern life and the need for mutual, comprehensive, and long-term infrastructure support; while at the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how political alignment and ideology—combined with access to nature and sanitized public spaces—can have a critical impact on societal and individual wellbeing. [...]associations made the public offices of the streets essential and enabled their appointees to cross the boundaries between public and private jurisdictions; to negate both resistance and the legitimacy of defense based on customary practice; and, to various degrees, to normalize practice among all social classes. According to Geltner, this ideology of modernity recognizes no notions of public-health policy before the Black Death and its recurrences, and no real systematic approach until the development of the modern nation state.