Using video as a means to combine the mediums of performance, poetry, and drawing, I plan to write, film, and edit a short film (fifteen to twenty minutes) that examines pulmonary tuberculosis as dominant romantic metaphor and as a deadly reality. By focusing on the literary endeavors of poets both real and fictional in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome, this film also undertakes a parallel exploration of Rome as paradoxical site of climactic cure for illness, as well as the crumbling evidence of a diseased culture.