The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been an unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the Romans, but it certainly became so within a few centuries after that event. This was a natural consequence of the neglect or wanton destruction of the public improvements, and especially the hydraulic works in which the Etruscans were so skilful, and of the felling of the upland forests, to satisfy the demand for wood at Rome for domestic, industrial, and military purposes. After the downfall of the Roman empire, the incursions of the barbarians, and then feudalism, foreign domination, intestine wars, and temporal and spiritual tyrannies, aggravated still more cruelly the moral and physical evils which Tuscany and the other Italian States were doomed to suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief respites during the whole period of modern history. The Maremma was already proverbially unhealthy in the time of Dante, who refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of confinement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode of execution. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the interference of private rights,[385] prevented the adoption of measures to remove it, and the growing political and commercial importance of the large towns in more healthful localities absorbed the attention of Government, and deprived the Maremma of its just share in the systems of physical improvement which were successfully adopted in interior and Northern Italy. Before any serious attempts were made to drain or fill up the marshes of the Maremme, various other sanitary experiments were tried. It was generally believed that the insalubrity of the province was the consequence, not the cause, of its depopulation, and that, if it were once densely inhabited, the ordinary operations of agriculture, and especially the maintenance of numerous domestic fires, would restore it to its ancient healthfulness.[386] In accordance with these views, settlers were invited from various parts of Italy, from Greece, and, after the accession of the Lorraine princes, from that country also, and colonized in the Maremme. To strangers coming from soils and skies so unlike those of the Tuscan marshes, the climate was more fatal than to the inhabitants of the neighboring districts, whose constitutions had become in some degree inured to the local influences, or who at least knew better how to guard against them. The consequence very naturally was that the experiment totally failed to produce the desired effects, and was attended with a great sacrifice of life and a heavy loss to the treasury of the state.