[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_.] [Footnote 237: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. pp. 287-307.]