Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and on September 28th of 1898, before ever he had done a single serious experiment, he read his paper before the famous and ancient Academy of the Lincei: “It is the anopheles mosquito that carries malaria if any mosquito carries malaria....” And he told them he was suspicious of two other brands of mosquitoes--but that was absolutely all, out of the thirty or forty different tribes that infected the low places of Italy. Then came an exciting autumn for Battista Grassi and an entertaining autumn for the wits of Rome, and a most important autumn for mankind. Besides all that it was a most itchy autumn for Mr. Sola, who for six years had been a patient of Dr. Bastianelli in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, high up on the top floor of this hospital that sat on a high hill of Rome. Here zanzarone never came. Here nobody ever got malaria. Here was the place for experiments. And here was Mr. Sola, who had never had malaria, every twist and turn of whose health Dr. Bastianelli knew, who told Battista Grassi that he would not mind being shut up with three different brands of hungry she-mosquitoes every night for a month. Grassi and Bignami and Bastianelli started off, strangely enough, with those two minor mosquito suspects--those two culexes that Grassi had discovered always hanging around malarious places along with the zanzarone.... They tortured Mr. Sola each night with hundreds of these mosquitoes. They shut poor Mr. Sola up in that room with those devils and turned off the light.... Nothing happened. Sola was a tough man. Sola showed not a sign of malaria. (It is not clear why Grassi did not start off by loosing his zanzarone at this Mr. Sola.) Maybe it was because Robert Koch had laughed publicly at this idea of the zanzarone--Grassi does admit that discouraged him. But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome to Moletta and came back with a couple of little bottles in which buzzed ten fine female anopheles mosquitoes. That night Mr. Sola had a particularly itchy time of it. Ten days later this stoical old gentleman shook horribly with a chill, his body temperature shot up into a high fever--and his blood swarmed with the microbes of malaria. “The rest of the history of Sola’s case has no interest for us,” wrote Grassi, “but it is now certain that mosquitoes can carry malaria, to a place where there are no mosquitoes in nature, to a place where no case of malaria has ever occurred, to a man who has never had malaria--Mr. Sola!” Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zanzarone, hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderly raised zanzarone on winter-melons and sugar-water; and in the top of the hospital of the Holy Spirit, in those high mosquito-proof rooms, Grassi and Bastianelli (to say nothing of another assistant, Bignami) loosed zanzarone into the bedrooms of people who had never had malaria--and so gave them malaria.