The Sack of Rome in May 1527 by mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V devastated the Eternal City, killing thousands and destroying irreplaceable artworks, manuscripts, and buildings. The Castel Sant'Angelo — Hadrian's ancient mausoleum converted into a fortress — provided refuge for Pope Clement VII, who watched the destruction from its ramparts. The trauma of the sack shattered Renaissance confidence in Rome as the eternal centre of civilisation and deeply affected the generation of writers and artists who survived it.

The Sack of Rome profoundly disrupted the Italian literary world, scattering poets and humanists from the papal court across Europe and ending the High Renaissance moment of Castiglione and Bembo. Pietro Aretino and other writers were forced to flee; the event haunted Italian poetry for decades. It reinforced a tradition of lament poetry — the planctus urbis — mourning the fallen city, a tradition that stretched back through Petrarch's 'Babylon' sonnets to classical Latin verse on Rome's ruins.