A “pragmatic” (similar to our today’s decree) of the University of Naples establishes a lockdown before its time on the occasion of the bubonic plague epidemic which struck the cities of Salerno and Cava de’ Tirreni with particular virulence. «Having understood – it is written in the document that has come down to us – on the occasion of illness that… many people under various pretexts try to move house from one neighborhood to another… wanting on our part to remedy said inconvenience, and that every one stays in his house and neighborhood where he is found, it seemed to us to make this Announcement”. To avoid contact and therefore contagion, the bread is distributed with shovels and the parish priests impart communion with the host placed on a cane. Ditches are dug to place the corpses which are then covered to prevent dogs from eating them, spreading the plague further.
From a medical point of view the only plausible therapy is that of cut the buboes and making people bleed to release the evil: they try to remove blood from the lower part of the limbs. With the plague there is the disintegration of families: fear terrifies everyone: the fear of dying tends to make us brutalized, the disease makes us selfish, everyone thinks exclusively of themselves; feelings are eliminated; the family members had their plague-stricken relatives taken away immediately: in Pagani an infected, dying young man was taken by his father, at night, on a horse, in front of the church which he found closed and dumped him on the ground. The young man, however, sensationally recovers and returns home where everyone flees in fear, believing him to be a spirit.
The plague lasts almost ten months. Sifting through some historical reconstructions it seems that the epidemic is so deadly as to halve the population. The bishop, Monsignor Lanfranchi, notes in the Diocese’s registers that they died only in Cava 6,300 people, over 50 percent of the population of the time, including 12 notaries, 12 doctors, 100 priests, 40 friars, 80 clerics. In the Church of San Nicola di Bari on a single day, June 24, 22 people were buried.
