Siena, Italy

IN 1348, THE BLACK DEATH took the lives of 70,000 of this city’s 100,000 inhabitants. Siena, whose exquisite art still amazes, never again had a population that large. Today, it numbers just 56,000.

The Black Death was traced to infected rats aboard a merchant ship from the Crimea that stopped in Sicily. The diseases carried by those rats ravaged not only Italy but all of Europe. The loss of life ranged from 12 percent in a city or region to the 70 percent reported in Siena. “No one wept for the dead,” wrote a denizen of the devastated city, “because everyone expected death himself.”