Black Death sweeps Florence

June 1348

By June the streets of Florence stank of corpses no one would bury. Boccaccio watched neighbors throw their own children out of windows. Three of every five Florentines died within months, the city's population plummeting from around ninety thousand to thirty-five thousand. Out of this catastrophe he conceived the Decameron, ten storytellers fleeing to a hilltop villa in Fiesole.