Whilst the treaty of peace was proceeding, Venice witnessed the sad and strange spectacle of Marino Faliero, her venerable Doge, four-score years old, being dragged to a public execution.

Some obscurity still hangs over the true history of this affair.

Petrarch himself seems to have understood it but imperfectly, though, from his personal acquaintance with Faliero, and his humane indignation at seeing an old man whom he believed to be innocent, hurled from his seat of power, stripped of his ducal robes, and beheaded like the meanest felon, he inveighs against his execution as a public murder, in his letter on the subject to Guido Settimo.
Petrarch, since his establishment at Milan, had thought it his duty to bring thither his son John, that he might watch over his education.

John was at this time eighteen years of age, and was studying at Verona.
The September of 1355 was a critical month for our poet.

It was then that the tertian ague commonly attacked him, and this year it obliged him to pass a whole month in bed.