Agnolo di Tura del Grasso

The mortality began in Siena in May 1348.  It was a cruel and horrible thing.  I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and pitiless ways.  It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupified by seeing the pain.  Victims died almost at once.  People would swell up in their armpits and their groins.  Father abondoned child, wife husband, brother sister.  No one could be found to bury the dead.  Great pits were dug tin Siena and were piled deep with the dead.  They died by the hundreds day and night.  I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands.

After the Translation by William M. Bowsky, The Black Death (1971) p. 13