The little Cappella di Piazza, attached as a loggia to the Palazzo Publico of Siena, was set up in gratitude for the cessation of the plague that carried off no less than thirty thousand persons. It was commenced in A.D. 1352 and completed in A.D. 1376. Hard by Siena the citizens of San Gimignano vowed an altar to St. Fabian and St. Sebastian as the price of their protection, and set it up between the doors of the Pieve or Collegiata. Above the place where once it stood is now the fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, commemorating the plague of A.D. 1464.
No less a man than Petrarch[149] has chronicled this plague at Parma. His letter is in no sense descriptive, but rather a long-drawn-out wail over the devastation, the loss of friends and relations, and the magnitude of the destruction, that seemed to him to threaten the utter extinction of the human race. Affectation is the key-note of his lamentations, that are freely interspersed with allusions to the ancient classics. Laura had died of plague at Avignon in A.D. 1348, and Petrarch in sadness of soul wrote these lines on the manuscript of his beloved Vergil, now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan:
‘Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th April, 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss. The melancholy truth was made known to me by letters, which I received at Parma on the 19th May.’
‘Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.’
‘To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the years that are gone.’
The Florentines, by way of rehabilitating their city after the Black Death, founded a university, and offered Petrarch a professorial chair, which he declined.
