Abstract/Hauptbeschreibung (Englisch)

The article is addressed at the early modern era, placing its natural environment and the development of historical studies in relation to the expansion of known geo-historical space, biological interaction, climate change and natural disasters, mentalities, and epidemics in order to arrive at a new definition of the term “environment”. This approach offers the basis for a rereading of the great plague epidemics, first distinguish- ing two environments: one urban and the other outside the cities. The Italian examples of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the Roman Plague of 1656-1657, offer the possibility of a useful com- parison with the present and encourage an interdisciplinary historical method.