“Wearing so many commas, it was natural for Atala to die of cholera.” In 1884 Filippo Guglielmi’s Atala (libretto by G. Cappuccini) premiered in Milan to mixed reviews, apparently too Wagnerian for Lombard critics. Based on Chateaubriand’s 1801 novella Atala, Guglielmi’s opera presumably featured a Frenchman named René who joined an American Indian tribe, though I haven’t seen the libretto. Chateaubriand was arguing against “noble savage” narratives, and–bypassing a more complex story of intermarriage–for present purposes it is mainly relevant that René eventually meets a violent end. The image must be an inside joke about the costumes, at a time when cholera was resurgent in Naples. We have previously encountered the comma bacillus as proxy for cholera.
(Cosmorama pittorico, Milan, 1884)

“And now, Almighty, where must we strike!”
“As usual, wherever more people who worship me are.”
(L’Asino, Rome, 1909)

Really wandering beyond my ken here, but I find this image from the Italian satirical magazine L’Asino rather amusing. The eponymous mascot is pouring disinfectant on what seems to be a very clerical populace below. The caption reads, “It has been a long time that The Ass has been fighting against microbes… cholera microbes.” (I imagine there is word play on the sense of “choleric” here, but I don’t speak Italian.) The magazine was stridently anticlerical, and the winking implication is that it has been doing battle with metaphorical contagions, while cholera (the sixth pandemic then touching mainly the easternmost portions of Europe) was a literal latecomer.
(L’Asino, Rome, 1910)