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[[File:Danse_macabre_by_Michael_Wolgemut.png|thumbnail| Dance of Death image from 15th century woodcut]]To Black Death spread to Italy from modern-day Russia. It was spread by Genoese merchants fleeing a Mongol attack on their trading post in Crimea. The plague was carried and spread by the fleas that lived on the Black Rat and brought to Italy on the Genoese ships.<ref>Pullan, Brian S. ''History of early Renaissance Italy: From the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century'' (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 76 </ref> The population of Italy was ill prepared for the spread of the disease. There had been a series of famine and food shortages in the region and the population was weak and vulnerable to disease and furthermore, the population did not have any natural resistance to the disease. Italy was the most urbanised society in Europe, Milan, Rome, Florence and other Italian centres among the largest on the continent.<ref> Pullan, 1973, p. 89</ref> The majority of the urban population in cities such as Naples were impoverished and lived in squalid and dirty conditions. These factors ensured that the diseases spread quickly and that there was a high level of mortality, among the poor, although even the rich could not escape the plague.<ref> Andrew B. Appleby's "Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age." ''Journal of Interdisciplinary History''. Vol. 10 No. 4., p. 56</ref> From the cities,the plague spread like wildfire to the small towns and villages of the peninsula.

[[File:Danse_macabre_by_Michael_Wolgemut.png|thumbnail| Dance of Death image from 15th century woodcut]]The Black Death was also an economic crisis as trade ceased because of fear of the spread of plague. As trade stagnated, businesses failed and unemployment rose. The plague caused a complete social breakdown in many areas and crime and violence became more common. Boccaccio in the Decameron, describes people abandoning their occupations, ignoring the sick and living lives of wild excess, as everyone expected to die. ‘Thus, doing exactly as they prescribed, they spent day and night moving from one tavern to the next, drinking without mode or measure, or doing the same thing in other people's homes, engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure….. And they combined this bestial behavior with as complete an avoidance of the sick as they could manage.'<ref> Boccaccio, Giovanni. ''The Decameron.'' (Penguin Classics, Hammondsworth, 1987) trans Mark Musa, p. 6</ref>