iii-xxiv).
Boccaccio also described the impact of the plague on Florence and its people. The wealthy fled the city for the ôcleanerö air and surroundings of their rural properties; shops and factories closed, prices for scarce foods and basic commodities soared as the market system which brought goods into the city from the countryside began to experience difficulties. As Boccaccio (1965) described it, ôIt was common practice of most of the neighbors, moved no less by fear of contamination by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the deceased, to drag corpses out of houses with their handsö (xxvii). Physicians routinely charged enormous sums for treatments that were pathetically useless, while priests wandered the streets ministering to the dead and dying until they, themselves, were stricken.
Gottfried (1983) writes that like others in Italian cities affected by the plague, the Florentines adopted an Epicurean attitude, ôdrinking, reveling, and spending money. Parents abandoned children, husbands left wives, and sick relatives were forsakenö (47). All manner of indecent behaviors which would, in normal times, have been severely chastised and not tolerated, began to become commonplace. A group called the ôBecchiniö appeared, consisting of men of lower soci
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