ated their deliverance by the erection of the
Redentore and S. Maria della Salute, churches which now form principal
ornaments of the Giudecca and the Grand Canal. Milan was devastated at
the same periods by plagues, of which we have detailed accounts in the
dispatches of resident Venetian envoys.[234] The mortality in the second
of these visitations was terrible. Before September 1629, fourteen
thousand had succumbed; between May and August 1630, forty-five thousand
victims had been added to the tale.[235]

[Footnote 233: Mutinelli, _Annali Urbani di Venezia_, pp.
470-483,549-550.]

[Footnote 234: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 310-340, and vol.
xiv. pp. 30-65.]

[Footnote 235: It is worth mentioning that Ripamonte calculates the
mortality from plague in Milan in 1524 at 140,000.]

At Naples in the year 1656, more than fifty thousand perished between
May and July; the dead were cast naked into the sea, and the Venetian
envoy describes the city as _'non piu citta ma spelonca di
morti_.'[236] In July his diary is suddenly interrupted, whether by
departure from the stricken town, or more probably by death, we know
not. Savoy was scourged by a fearful pestilence in the years 1598-1600.
Of this plague we possess a frightfully graphic picture in the same
accurate series of the State documents.[237] Simeone Contarini, then
resident at Savigliano, relates that more than two-thirds of the
population in that province had been swept away before the autumn of
1598, and that the evil was spreading far and wide through Piedmont. In
Alpignano, a village of some four hundred inhabitants, only two
remained. In Val Moriana, forty thousand expired out of a total of
seventy thousand. The village of San Giovanni counted but twelve
survivors from a population of more than four thousand souls. In May
1599, the inhabitants of Turin were reduced by flight and death to four
thousand; and of these there died daily numbers gradually rising through
the summer from 50 to 180. The streets were encumbered with unburied
corpses, the houses infested by robbers and marauders. Some incidents
reported of this plague are ghastly in their horror. The infected were
treated with inhuman barbarity, and retorted with savage fury, battering
their assailants with the pestiferous bodies of unburied victims.

[Footnote 236: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. in. pp. 229-233. Botta has
given an account of this plague in the twenty-sixth book of his
_History_.]