This would usually form from the bite of the infected flea. The bacteria would multiply in the lymph node. The lumps would become visible mostly in the armpits and necks. Bleeding internally resulted in dark spots all over the body visible to the eye, making people aware that they were infected by the plague. Soon after they turned black, and squirted pus and blood. The plague was transmitted to humans through flea bites. The fleas would bite rats and absorb the bacteria within their blood known as, Yersinia Pestis. This becoming another way the plague would spread from town to town killing many. In the “Decameron,” the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio describes the buboes and writes, “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.” Giovanni Boccaccio was born in Certaldo, Tuscany, in which he grew to be an Italian poet and scholar whom is best remembered as the author of the