When the plague approached in spring 1348, the Milanese ruler Luchino Visconti had the city completely isolated. Sick people were walled in as a precaution. Milan was thus the only city in Italy to be spared. Volker Reinhardt has reviewed all the sources on the Great Plague. He shows how the supposed European conflagration was a sum of local dramas which people coped with in very different ways: through political upheavals, persecution of minorities, restoration of old conditions or even praise of the tyrannis à la Milan.