ABSTRACT
Desperate in view of the mounting death toll, which by August 1577 had reached around 10,000 (Cohn Jr, 2010), the people of Milan vowed to build a temple and dedicate it Saint Sebastian if he succeeded in purging the curse of the Black Death from their city. Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of plague. It was believed that the plague of 680 that had struck northern Italy nearly a thousand years earlier, had stopped only after a relic of the saint’s arm was moved from Rome and set up in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Pavia. The foundation stone of the new temple in Milan was laid in September 1577, and on January 20, 1578, on the Feast of Saint Sebastian, the plague was officially declared to have passed. To this day, the cylindrical temple, located near Milan’s Duomo, symbolizes pain and rebirth from darkness and death. In Bristow’s book, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza
Epidemic (2012), the author argues that the Americans have developed a “national amnesia,” erasing the dark days of pandemic from their collective memory, in order to compose an optimistic narrative. Yet, the echoes of the great epidemics and the death they entail are never really erased from our collective memory. They may indeed be buried deep in the storerooms of our mind, but just as the Milanese brought back the memory of an ancient plague in 1577 that had struck nearly a thousand years earlier to help them cope with the new incidence of the plague, we revive memories of previous epidemics each time a new one strikes.
