The total mortality of this pestilence in Milan has been estimated roughly at 150,000 persons. The Sanità, or Board of Health, profiting by the lessons of the previous plague, seem to have acted with sense and energy, though hampered by the ignorant obstinacy of the Senate, the Council of Decurions, and the Magistrates, who were afraid of driving away trade, if the presence of plague were admitted. One strange remedial measure was the organization of an immense procession through the streets in honour of San Carlo. During the procession all the sequestered houses were fastened up with nails to prevent the infected inmates from joining in it. Deaths were so numerous at the height of the plague that the burial-pits were filled, and bodies lay putrefying in the houses and streets. The Sanità sought the help of two priests, who undertook to dispose of all the corpses in four days. With the assistance of peasants, whom they summoned from the country in the name of religion, three immense pits were dug. The Sanità employed _monatti_ to bring out the dead and cart them to the pits, and the priests accomplished their task within the appointed time. Besides the _monatti_ they appointed _apparitores_, or summoners, who went in advance of the _monatti_ ringing a bell to warn the people to bring out their dead. _Commissari_ supervised both _apparitores_ and _monatti_. Piazza was one of these overseers.
The plagues of the seventeenth century have left behind them very many memorials both in literature and in art: among them the great plague of Milan is only one of many.
Southern France was attacked again and again, and in 1643 plague raged fiercely at Lyons. Over the portico of the church of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, which stands high up on the precipitous hill that overhangs the town, is a frieze commemorating this plague.
In Italy, city after city succumbed. Guido’s picture, ‘Il Pallione del Voto,’ reminds us that Bologna suffered along with Milan. Venice suffered too, and out of her ruin rose the church of S. Maria della Salute.
Florence retains in the Bargello a hideous reminiscence of her visitation in a wax representation of ‘Pestilenza’ by Zumbo Gaetano Giulio (1656-1701). Corpses are lying about in various stages of decomposition: among them lies a dead mother beside her infant child. A man, whose nostrils are covered with a bandage, attempts to carry away a corpse. In the background great bonfires are burning. The modelling of the carcases is anatomically exact, but the production as a whole is utterly repulsive.