The Blog  Goodbye to All That  Will Italy and rest of Europe
depopulate itself to extinction?  12:00 AM, Apr 30, 2004 • By
TERRY EASTLAND Widget tooltip Single Page Print Larger Text
Smaller Text Alerts  Siena, Italy  IN 1348, THE BLACK DEATH took
the lives of 70,000 of this city's 100,000 inhabitants. Siena,
whose exquisite art still amazes, never again had a population
that large. Today, it numbers just 56,000.  The Black Death was
traced to infected rats aboard a merchant ship from the Crimea
that stopped in Sicily. The diseases carried by those rats
ravaged not only Italy but all of Europe. The loss of life
ranged from 12 percent in a city or region to the 70 percent
reported in Siena. "No one wept for the dead," wrote a denizen
of the devastated city, "because everyone expected death
himself."  Today, a visitor to Italy is struck by the fact that
demographic destruction is occurring once again, though this
time more slowly. There is no Black Death, no communicable
disease that the destruction can be blam