However, by March 1348 the former Florentine wunderkind was an impoverished and disgraced old man—his fortune lost, his good name blackened beyond repair. Ten years earlier, at the age of sixty-two, Villani had endured the double humiliation of bankruptcy and debtors’ prison. After his release, the former banker returned to chronicling, a passion that survived all the storms and seasons of life, but postimprisonment Villani showed a new appetite for disastrous and apocalyptic events, as if drawn to situations that mirrored his own embittered old age. And during the 1340s, Florence was happy to
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