The Italian city of Pisa was no stranger to violence, war, disease or revolution. In its turn, the twentieth century brought it democracy, wars abroad, revolution, dictatorship and then war at home. By 1944 the dictatorship of Mussolini had given way before a coup at home, invasion by Allied forces in the south of the country, and an occupation by his German allies moving from the north to meet this advance. Pisa itself was now garrisoned by German forces. On the night of 17 June 1944 British bombers attacked it. Incendiaries fell in rapid succession on the central medieval piazza and soon fires had broken out there. In the mayhem, sections of one of the treasures of the Piazza Miracoli, the great mural by the Master of the Black Death which had for centuries adorned the walls of the ancient graveyard, were engulfed in flames. Much of it was lost for ever.

The mural was a work of the fourteenth century. It offered a colossal depiction of all the social orders of medieval Italy, crowds of men and women, the beautiful and gracious and the mean and humble, the clergy and the bishops, the nobility, the clergy, the artisans and the poor, all caught up together in a grotesque reflection on death and judgement, damnation and salvation. Such a picture might well have appeared remote and barbarous only a generation before, but in the inferno of the Second World War it spoke now with a terrible new life, even as it was consumed.