The Invasion of Plague in Early Modern Italy

This chapter discusses the origins and spread of plague in northern Italy. Plague arrived in Italy in 1629 with French and German troops. It is no accident that the initial cases of plague identified in October of 1629 were first in Piedmont in the Val di Susa, west of Turin and near the border with France, and secondly in the Valtellina in Lombardy, subsequently travelling to Lake Como to the north of Milan. Other cities in northern Italy soon became infected and on May 6, 1630, the authorities as far south as Bologna announced the official outbreak of plague. Judging by the rapidity with which plague spread between these northern urban centres, one would have expected the epidemic to have arrived in Tuscany by early May, given that Bologna is only 65 miles north of Florence, but it was delayed by both natural and man-made factors. Tuscany is separated from Reggio-Emilia by the Apennine mountain range, which provided a physical barrier and facilitated the control of traffic coming from the north. The chapter then traces the preventive measures adopted by the health board as the plague approached Tuscany, including cordons sanitaires along frontiers, the removal of the sick to quarantine centres, and the rapid burial of the dead.

The Impact of Plague and Quarantine

This chapter details the impact on the population of the policies discussed in the previous chapter. It first analyses the factors underlying the spread of plague, both through Florence and at a more local level in the city's largest parish, S. Lorenzo. Based on records of city and parish, it has been possible to analyse the number of people infected and buried in relation to the topographical and social profiles of individual streets. If this enables one to consider some of the environmental determinants of infection, it is also possible to assess the impact on mortality of the policy of removing the sick from their houses to Lazaretti, through comparing the number of people buried in extra-mural plague pits with those at the isolation hospitals. For contemporaries it was successful, since higher numbers died in Lazaretti, suggesting that they had managed to identify and remove the sick before they got worse. This policy remained in force the next year when a new strategy was introduced, with the imposition from mid-January of a general 40-day quarantine of the inhabitants of both the city and the surrounding countryside. Although this was an extremely expensive operation, since food and drink were being supplied daily to over 34,000 people, the continued drop in mortality led contemporaries to regard this as fulfilling their aims.

Plague and Public Health: Treating the Body of the City and the Body of the Poor

This chapter examines the ways in which the combined administrative and medical expertise informed the developing strategies of the Italian government during the early stages of the epidemic. While conforming to more general public health policies of Italian states, it also considers how far the Florentine experience of plague was mediated through existing local structures and the political status quo. The influence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, remained very evident, as he sought to intervene in and to influence the developing policy of the magistrates of the health board, which was constituted by patricians who were members of his court. Meanwhile, the voluntary lay religious group, the Archconfraternity of the Misericordia, played a vital role in the transport and burial of the sick and the dead. While their porters and grave-diggers were paid, the members of the fraternity themselves performed their tasks from a sense of Christian charity towards the poorer members of society, a motivation which formed the obverse of the government's decrees against marginalised groups, such as prostitutes and Jews. A mixed motivation also informed the strategies of the medical staff in the service of the Sanità (health board), and the chapter looks at their role—sometimes distant, sometimes interventionist and sometimes compassionate—in inspecting the sick and recommending a wide range of treatments for the more affluent and the humble.