Cleaning and sanitation: a global history

With this book, Giulio Guizzi has recounted the history of cleaning in various eras by blending a purely chronological account of the various key and particular periods for dirt and cleaning with the cultural concept, highlighting social and private aspects related to notions of dirt/clean and healthy/unhealthy with all their consequences on the life of society. He has also described the means and systems gradually devised for removing dirt: the tools that mark the phases of what he ironically calls "The dirty history of clean". The aim of the author emerges clearly in these pages, namely to facilitate emancipation of the work of cleaning: cleaning is to be understood and defended as a positive, socially targeted profession, which knows and uses mechanical, electronic and detergent discoveries, which pursues hygiene and which maintains industries, offices, schools, hospitals, hotels, all communities and, of course, houses liveable and healthy.