In the first week of June, when the city still pretended it was managing, a man on my street put a chair outside his front door and sat in it. His name was Aldo. He made shoes. He sat in the chair for two days and then he was dead and the chair sat empty for a week before anyone moved it, because no one wanted to touch a thing that a dead man had touched.
That was how it was at the beginning. The disease arrived before its reputation. By the time we understood what we were dealing with, it was already inside the walls, inside the houses, inside the bodies of people who had not yet begun to show it.
The Shape of the Sickness
I am a cloth merchant. I had been to Genoa twice and to Venice once, and I had heard the stories coming up from the south — Messina, Palermo, Pisa. I told myself it would burn itself out before reaching us, the way fires sometimes do when they reach a break in the dry grass. I told myself this to get through the work of March, and April, and May, during which the price of wool rose and then fell and then ceased to mean anything to anyone.
The sickness came in two shapes. The first: a swelling in the armpit or the groin, hard as a knot of wood, tender to the touch, that grew to the size of an egg over two or three days. Fever, shivering, vomiting. Some of these people survived. Most did not. The second shape was worse: dark spots, like bruises, spreading across the chest and arms. No swelling, no warning. These people were dead inside three days.
My neighbor Benedetto, who was a tanner, developed the swelling on a Thursday. His wife told me on Friday. By Sunday she was at my door again, not to give news of him but to ask if I had seen the becchini — the gravediggers — because Benedetto was dead and she could not get him out of the house alone. I had not seen them. No one could get enough of them. They charged whatever they wished.
What the Doctors Said
The doctors disagreed. This is what I remember most vividly about the first weeks: the confidence with which learned men contradicted each other. One said it was bad air rising from corrupted earth. Another said it was the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in Aquarius in 1345, which had drawn poisonous vapors from the sea. A third said it was God's punishment for the sins of the Florentines, by which he appeared to mean sins other than his own.
The practical advice was similar from all of them: do not go near the sick, do not touch anything a sick person has touched, leave the city if you can, eat lightly, avoid strong emotions. On the matter of strong emotions, there was something approaching consensus. Fear, in particular, was said to open the body to the disease. I tried not to be afraid. This was like trying not to breathe.
The physicians who continued seeing patients did so wearing long gowns, gloves, and masks stuffed with herbs — rosemary, lavender, camphor — to filter the bad air. Some refused to enter houses. Some left Florence entirely. I do not judge them. I understood the arithmetic. To stay was to die.
The Empty Houses
By July, there were houses on my street where everyone was dead. Not just one person, not just a family — everyone, including the servants and, in one case, the dog. The doors stood open. In the heat, the smell came out into the street and stayed there.
People stopped greeting each other. Not from unfriendliness — from the knowledge that to be near another person was to be near the disease. Men walked down the middle of the street, away from the walls. Women who had been neighbors for twenty years crossed to the other side when they saw each other coming. There was a particular shame in this, a grief for the breach of ordinary human warmth, but the shame was not strong enough to override the fear.
I watched a man walk away from his sick brother. He did it quickly, without looking back, as if the speed of walking away could make it something other than what it was. I thought I would never do such a thing. I thought this with great certainty, as people think of things they have not yet been tested on.
My warehouse assistant, a boy named Gianni, came to work until the second week of July. Then he did not come. I sent someone to find out why. The someone came back and said Gianni's mother had the spots and there was no one else. I paid a month's wages to the becchini when the time came, because I had promised him once that I would look after him if anything happened. He was sixteen. He had been good with numbers.
The Processions
The flagellants came through in mid-July. I had heard of them — they had come up from Perugia, moving from town to town, two hundred or three hundred strong, lashing their backs with leather straps while they walked and singing, in a minor key that carried for miles, hymns of repentance. The logic was that the plague was God's punishment, and if they punished themselves sufficiently, God might be satisfied and stop punishing everyone else.
I stood at a second-floor window to watch them pass. The men went bare-chested. Their backs were raw. The sound of the straps and the sound of the singing were terrible together, not because they were discordant but because they were not — they had a rhythm, a practiced quality, as if suffering had been organized into something almost musical. It was the most frightening thing I saw that summer, more frightening than the carts. The carts you could explain. The procession suggested that explanation had run out.
The priests of Santa Croce refused them entry to the church. I heard there was a confrontation at the doors. Later, the Bishop of Florence wrote to say the flagellants were heretics and should be dispersed. By then they had already moved north toward Bologna.
The Counting
I began keeping a list in August, because I needed to do something with my hands in the evenings that did not involve the wine I was drinking too much of. I wrote down the names of the dead that I knew. I filled three pages. Then I stopped, not because I had run out of names but because the list had begun to feel like a transaction, as if writing the names down made their deaths into something I was recording rather than living through.
The grain price had tripled. The wool price had collapsed to nothing because there was no one to buy finished cloth. The butcher on the Borgo Ognissanti was still open; he had, by some arrangement I did not inquire into too closely, a reliable supply of pork, and I went there twice a week for the company as much as for the meat. He was a large, cheerful man who had lost his wife and two daughters and did not seem to have changed at all, which I found both admirable and unsettling. He said the same thing each time: God's will is mysterious. I said yes.
What Remained
I survived the summer. Many did not.
In September the dying slowed. Not stopped — it did not stop for a long time — but slowed to a rate the city could begin, grimly, to absorb. The empty houses were there. The empty streets were there. The city that remained was a smaller city, wearing the skin of the larger one that had existed before June.
What I noticed, in the months after: the survivors did not speak of it much. Not from suppression, exactly. More from the sense that the vocabulary did not exist. There are words for individual grief. There are no words for a city that has lost three in four of its people and must decide how to continue being a city. We were all strangers in a place we had lived all our lives. The faces that were still there were familiar, but the absence of the other faces was so enormous that it surrounded all of us, always, and made everything strange.
I kept the warehouse. I hired two new assistants — there were young men enough who needed work, whose families were gone and who had no other place to go. I did not replace Gianni's position. I left it empty. I could not explain why, exactly, only that it seemed right to leave a space where a thing had been.
Narrator's note: Lorenzo Vecchi is a fictional figure. The events, social conditions, and medical responses he describes are drawn from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), written in the immediate aftermath of the 1348 epidemic, and from modern historical scholarship on the Black Death in Florence. The estimated death toll of 50–75% of Florence's population is consistent with contemporary records and modern epidemiological analysis.