Once the plague moved from Genoa to Pisa it spread with alarming speed through Tuscany to Florence, Siena and Rome. The disease also came ashore from Messina to Southern Italy, but much of the province of Calabria was rural, and it proceeded more slowly northward.
When the pestilence reached Milan, the occupants of the first three houses it struck were walled up -- sick or not -- and left to die. This horrifyingly harsh measure, ordered by the Archbishop, appeared to succeed to some degree, for Milan suffered less from the plague than any other major Italian city.
Florence -- the thriving, prosperous center of trade and culture -- was particularly hard-hit, by some estimates losing as much as 65,000 residents. For descriptions of the tragedies in Florence we have the eyewitness accounts of two of its most famous residents: Petrarch, who lost his beloved Laura to the disease in Avignon, France; and Boccaccio, whose most famous work, the Decameron, would center on a group of people fleeing Florence to avoid the plague.
In Siena, work on a cathedral that had been proceeding apace was interrupted by the plague. Workers died or grew too ill to continue; money for the project was diverted to deal with the health crisis. When the plague was over and the city had lost half its people, there were no more funds for church-building, and the partially-constructed transept was patched up and abandoned to become part of the landscape, where you can still see it today.
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