Reflecting on the recovery and reuse of garments and everyday objects leads, especially when encountering similar historical testimonies, to questions about the degree of wear that determined the boundary between what could still be reused and what had to be discarded. This is the case, for instance, in this note written in the hand of the 'priest of the plague' of the hospital of San Sebastiano and San Rocco. The document records the final days of Miniato, son of Francescho della Corte of San Sebastiano: 'On the 3rd of November Miniato fell ill at the hospital, and he died on the 4th of the same month. And the clothes he was wearing were all worn out, and they were taken with him to the grave.'
Here, the material condition of the garments becomes inseparable from the fate of the person who wore them: the threshold of reuse is also the threshold of exhaustion, where objects - and lives - reach their end together.