“The plague had already entered Milan,” Alessandro Manzoni writes in “The Betrothed,” the 19th century Italian literary classic renowned for its vivid descriptions of the 1630 pestilence that gutted Milan.

In the novel, dreaded cart men wind their way through Milan’s streets and “purposely let fall from their carts infected clothes, in order to propagate and keep up the pestilence, which had become to them a means of living, a kingdom, a festival.” Manzoni writes that “the city, already tumultuously inclined, was now turned upside down.”

The outbreak of the coronavirus in and around Milan is light-years from the horrors of the plague, and for now only just over a dozen people have died, and they were elderly or with serious underlying health conditions.