Abstract:La Peste di Milano del 1630 by Benedetto Cinquanta interrogates the representation of power, eaten away by contagion, during the famous Lombard sanitary crisis. At the top of the new social pyramid, former “master-less servants” who have become all-powerful – the crows – are responsible for evacuating bodies ; they become figures of the poor in power, whose ferocious and dehumanising cruelty incarnates a system of transitional values rejected by the author.
