Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The night before, the Germans had withdrawn north of the city centre to the line of the Mugnone canal; and later on that morning, their departure having been noticed by a partisan outpost, a woman messenger was sent racing across to the Palazzo della Signoria to tell the men of the Committee of National Liberation to ring the big bell and run up the tricolour at the top of the tower.

  As the bells of the Bargello echoed the tolling of La Martinella, and another observation post was established in the cupola of the Duomo, copies of a manifesto were posted up in the streets informing the people that the Committee of National Liberation had taken over as the provisional government. At the same time La Nazione, which had been purveying Fascist propaganda for decades, was taken over by a commission which appointed as editor of a new newspaper, La Nazione del Popolo, a leading member of the Action Party, Carlo Levi, painter, physician and soon to become internationally renowned as the author of the masterly Cristo si è fermato a Eboli.

  The first assault by the partisans on the Germans north of Florence on 11 August was repulsed with heavy losses; and, while the Allies were preparing to launch their own attack, the threat of German incursions into the city remained. On the night of 15 August a German patrol, headed by a tank, pushed its way into Piazza San Marco; and as late as 21 August a German shell hit the Campanile, while a fragment of another struck the Madonna outside the Bigallo and took off her head. On that same day the actor Derek Bond, then an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and two other British officers, were taken prisoner, having entered the city on a sightseeing visit on the assurance that the Germans had evacuated it. Fascist snipers, supposed to have been organized by Alessandro Pavolini before his departure from his suite in the Excelsior Hotel, were still firing from rooftops and attics on unwary pedestrians below them. When caught by partisans, these snipers were dragged down into the streets and almost invariably executed after summary trials. One day eleven of them were lined up after a brief trial by a tribunal set up in the Hotel Baglioni, and shot in front of the church of Santa Maria Novella.

  When the Allies launched their attack, the German army prepared to retreat. Its commander, Field-Marshal Kesselring, had never intended stopping the Allies along the line of the Arno, but merely planned to delay them while withdrawing his forces to the far stronger Gothic Line which was to stretch across the peninsula from north of Pisa to Pesaro. He abandoned Fiesole on 7 September.

  By then the Allied Military Government, established in the Villa Torrigiani,2 had taken over direct control of Florence, much to the annoyance of the Committee of National Liberation, who considered themselves quite capable of undertaking the responsibility. However, the Allied Military Government did not rescind the orders already given by the Committee and made use of most of the personnel whom they recommended.

  There was much for them all to do. Food was in alarmingly short supply for those who could not afford the prices charged on the black market, the Germans having driven off with them large numbers of cattle; housing was also difficult to come by, not only for the thousands of refugees who came into the city from the contado, but also for those tens of thousands whose homes had been demolished by the retreating army.

  Yet, gradually Florence began to recover from its ordeal and to regain its former appearance. The scaffolding and sandbags were removed from its treasured monuments; shops reopened their doors; works of art, brought from their hiding-places or recovered by the Allies as they were being transported to Germany, were returned to churches and galleries; and, as government rapidly succeeded Italian government and mayor followed mayor, war damage was made good and new buildings appeared. The Ponte alla Vittoria was opened in 1946, the Ponte San Niccolò in 1949, the Ponte alla Carraia in 1951, the Ponte Amerigo Vespucci in 1957. The Ponte Santa Trinita, meticulously rebuilt by masons using copies of sixteenth-century tools and stone from the reopened Boboli quarries, was completed in 1958 but without the head of Pietro Francavilla's statue of Primavera, which was missing when the rest of her body was recovered from the river bed. However, it was brought up by a dredger three years later and was replaced with fitting ceremony on the statue's long neck.3

  27

  FLOOD AND RESTORATION 1966 – 92

  ‘At 9.45 a.m. the flood burst into the Piazza del Duomo.’

  FRANCO NENCINI

  In the middle of the night of 3 November 1966 the colonel commanding the carabinieri in Florence was woken by the ringing of his telephone. He was told that from Figlini and from other places in the valley of the Arno, urgent pleas for help had been made: water in the river was rising fast; farmers were driving their cattle to higher ground; a few people had already clambered to the roofs of their houses.

  As the night wore on Florence itself received the first warnings of catastrophe. To the north the Mugnone burst its banks and water cascaded down towards the Cascine, where frantic efforts were made to save the horses in the stables by the racecourse, seventy of which were drowned; water began pouring into cellars of buildings by the Arno; jets of water suddenly began gushing out of manholes, throwing the iron covers high into the air; supplies of electricity and gas were both abruptly cut off; above the Ponte alle Grazie and between the Ponte Santa Trinita and the Ponte Vecchio the rapidly rising waters poured across the lungarni, sweeping cars before them in the flood. The arches of the Ponte Vecchio were all but submerged and the bridge itself seemed in danger of collapse.

  The night watchman on duty telephoned several of the jewellers who had shops on the bridge to warn them of the danger to their premises. ‘We grabbed five or six suitcases,’ recalled Signora Albertina Piccini-Risalti, the wife of one goldsmith thus alerted,

  and tore off in the car. It was a dangerous ride, for there were plenty of other cars speeding about. It was pouring with rain when we got to the bridge… About fifteen rough-looking youths started prancing about behind us, laughing and shouting abuse.

  It must have been just on two when we entered the shop. The floor was shaking terribly under our feet, and outside I could see tree trunks charging

  Caption

  Waters of the Arno rushing through the arches of the Ponte Santa Trinita in November 1966.

  along and looking as if they were going to crash in through the window. Our first inclination was to run away. We could hear awful thuds and bangs going on, and the floor was shaking and shaking. The water could not have been more than a metre below us. We spent ten minutes or so in the first room, grabbing the first things that came to hand and articles belonging to our clients. When I think now of all the things we left behind, all the things we lost, I could weep… Then two carabinieri came, and they banged at the door, too. ‘Come away! The bridge is in danger!’ The boys were still outside, and a friend saw me home. I picked up some more suitcases and went back to the bridge. The lights had gone out and it was pitch dark and pouring with rain… We collected up some more things but then the bridge started shaking so violently that we thought it was going to collapse at any moment, and we ran for it. The last thing I remember is a huge tree trunk and a Fiat 1100 butting at the window of the shop; I thought for a moment I had gone mad. Some people were still on the bridge, and the carabinieri were shouting: ‘At your own risk and peril!’ And we shouted at the carabinieri: ‘Why don't you get in your cars and go and give the alarm?’ And they replied – and you could see they were embarrassed – ‘We have no orders’.

  Most of the people of Florence were still in bed, quite unaware of the scale of the disaster, oblivious to the fact that shopkeepers in the lower parts of the city, in Piazza Sante Croce, by San Frediano and in Via Guicciardini, were furiously trying to save their wares, bailing mud and water from their lower floors. But when morning came, there could no longer be doubt that Florence was in the grip of the worst flood since 1844. ‘The spray off the yellow, ever spreading river brought visibility down to a minimum,’ wrote Franco Nencini, whose Firenze: I giorni del diluvio, gives a vivid first-hand account of these days.

  T
he river had completely burst its banks, sweeping away the parapets and trees and tearing the very stones out of the roads… The rising waters carried away hundreds of motor-cars, flinging them violently against the walls, doors and street signs… The mournful sound [of short-circuited car horns] was the daylong accompaniment to the flood – together with the shouts of those who were trapped, the barking of dogs, the pounding of the water against the walls of buildings as high as nine or ten feet above the ground… Thousands of houses were flooded and the first victims already lay beneath the mud… From the roofs of low houses in the poorer parts of the city people were crying in vain for help… At 9.45 a.m. the flood burst into the Piazza del Duomo.

  From his room in the newly completed offices of Florence's newspaper, the Nazione, Franco Nencini saw people on the roofs of houses waving sheets to attract attention. Later, a helicopter rescued some of them; but its operations were hampered by wires and television aerials. An officer lowered himself from the machine and threw bread and milk to the stranded people, together with tins of food, which they had no means of opening. From

  ‘At 9.45 a.m. the flood burst into the Piazza del Duomo.’

  time to time Nencini heard loud reports as tanks of carbide were flung together, stores of paraffin blew up and boilers exploded.

  In the hospital of San Giovanni di Dio patients in the lower wards were being carried to upper storeys while thousands of gallons of muddy water poured through the ground floor destroying the hospital's stocks of food. At the same time in the Uffizi and the Museo della Scienza treasures were being hurriedly carried upwards out of danger. In the flooded church and cloister of Santa Croce big bundles of manuscripts from the nearby Biblioteca Nazionale were floating about, while monks, using tables as rafts, were endeavouring to salvage what they could. In the Piazza San Giovanni panels from Ghiberti's and Pisano's doors were wrenched loose by the swirling waters which, now thick with oil as well as mud, were sweeping along at nearly forty miles an hour, carrying uprooted trees, vehicles, furniture, doors and window frames in their tumultuous path. From the Santa Teresa prison, where the inmates had been escorted to the top floor, came sounds of firing. The warders had been overpowered, and the prisoners began diving down into the surging waters below to cling to tree trunks and bits of wreckage. One young prisoner hesitated. ‘Where do you think you're going?’ a woman called to him. ‘To take the waters at Montecatini,’ he shouted back, before jumping to his death.

  A car carried away by the flood outside the Biblioteca Nazionale.

  Some of those who escaped made their way later across the rooftops to a house in the Via Manzoni. ‘They were shivering with cold and soaked to the skin,’ the owner of the house recalled. ‘Some of them looked pretty tough customers… But the odd thing was they all seemed shy and embarrassed… They were all on their best behaviour, exchanging polite remarks, offering cigarettes – and never failing to use the ashtrays.’ They politely accepted food, then swam away down the street. ‘I drove up to the Piazzale Michelangelo’, wrote Carlo Coccioli in Il Giorno.

  Night had fallen by now, and there were no lights to be seen; it rained incessantly, and Florence lay at the mercy of her enraged river. There was no voice offering counsel, not a searchlight, no bells ringing, no help being given – only silence. Talkative, argumentative and sarcastic though they normally are, the people of Florence were playing out their drama in silence. The river alone was heard; there was nothing but the river, with its swirling mixture of oil and mud.

  The next morning, as the water level slowly sank, leaving a thick and noisome deposit of mud and oil in the streets, the citizens came out with buckets, brooms and shovels, and, with makeshift implements made out of broken doors and pieces of furniture, set about the Herculean task of clearing away the detritus, a threat to health as well as a barrier to traffic and an affront to the eye. Later there was to be much criticism of the authorities, national and local, for their failure to respond adequately to the crisis; but there could be no doubt about the good-natured determination of the citizens as they worked to make Florence clean again.

  It was estimated that over 15,000 cars had been wrecked, 6,000 shops put out of business, and that almost 14,000 families were homeless. The lists of damaged works of art, books and archives made tragic reading. Florence's plight aroused worldwide compassion: offers of help came from all over Europe and from America. In London the Italian Art and Archives Rescue Fund was established under the chairmanship of Sir Ashley Clarke, who had retired as ambassador in Rome four years before; and this organization immediately sent out to Italy Professor Nicolai Rubinstein, author of The Government of Florence under the Medici, and John Pope-Hennessy, at that time Keeper of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  In his memoirs Pope-Hennessy describes the devastating consequences of the flood for works of art in Florence. He was ‘reminded of the images of supernatural disasters that punctuate Florentine Quattrocento painting’:

  The first indications of disaster appeared on the road from Bologna… Lorry after lorry loaded with rusty cars was climbing slowly northward… scarcely did we leave the highway than in the western suburbs of the town, far from the river, oil stains started to appear along the streets at shoulder height and piles of rotting woodwork could be seen standing outside each door. Inside the town, parties of soldiers were at work clearing the slime, but more than two weeks after the flood the mud in the Piazza Santa Croce was still ankle deep, and the Via de' Bardi at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio was a morass of mud and oil.

  Altogether fifteen thousand cars were wrecked in the floods of 1966, like this one in Piazza Mentana.

  Treasures in the refectory of Santa Croce had been blackened by the mud; on the right wall of the nave of the church Donatello's Cavalcanti Annunciation was ‘soaked with oil to the level of the Virgin's knees’; inside the Pazzi Chapel the water had risen to about two thirds of the height of the pietra serena arcading; the flood waters had submerged the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella and the Ognissanti and cascaded down the Via Ghibellina, smashing the windows of the Casa Buonarroti. The Museo Horne, the Museo di Storia della Scienza and the Museo Archeologico had all been flooded and their contents badly damaged. Marble sculptures in the courtyard of the Bargello had been impregnated with dense patches of oil. Indeed, in the centre of the town, scarcely a monument or a church had survived unscathed.

  But, encouraged by an energetic mayor, Piero Bargellini, and the highly capable Superintendent of Fine Arts, Ugo Procacci, groups of restorers were already at work; and others, their expenses paid by Sir Ashley Clarke's Rescue Fund and similar committees in Italy and other countries, were soon to join them. A restoration studio was established in the Palazzo Davanzati and here Kenneth Hempel, ‘the most accomplished restorer of Italian sculpture in the world’, and Joyce Plesters, head of the research laboratory at the National Gallery in London, jointly discovered, as Pope-Hennessy recorded, ‘the first traces of gilding in the hair of Donatello's wooden Magdalen’.1

  By the end of the decade there was little to show how devastating the flood had been, apart from the marks on walls indicating the height the waters had reached. Florence's four hundred hotels and pensioni were filled with tourists, almost five million of whom arrived in 1971, over ten times as many as the resident population. They found a city which appeared to be as prosperous as it had been in the Middle Ages, with a thriving textile trade and numerous fashion houses and manufacturers of leather goods that had made such names as Gucci, Pucci and Ferragamo familiar the world over.

  Yet for all the modernity of the city centre, in which speeding mopeds made crossing streets a hazardous experience, the ancient stones of Florence remain solid and immutable; and no visitor can fail to be haunted by the ghosts and moved by remembrances of the past that linger around them. At every corner a figure seems to emerge momentarily from the shadows – Dante angrily throwing the tools out of a workshop where he has heard a smi
th singing one of his poems so badly; Michelangelo striving to release imprisoned bodies from the blocks of marble in his bottega in the shadow of the Duomo; the apothecary, Luca Landucci, exasperated by the huge piles of stones which blocked the street outside his shop when the builders were at work on the vast Palazzo Strozzi; Lorenzo il Magnifico gorgeously arrayed for his victory in the giostra at Santa Croce; Fra Angelico, with tears in his eyes, painting Christ on the Cross in San Marco; Alessandro and Lorenzino de' Medici galloping through the streets on the same horse, dressed in women's clothes and shouting insults at the passers-by; Savonarola foretelling doom with such passion and conviction in his apocalyptic sermons that Pico della Mirandola feels his hair stand on end; Anna Maria, the last of the Medici, tall, proud and stiff-backed, living out her remaining years in the Pitti Palace in a comfortless room surrounded by silver furniture; James Boswell, ‘quite furious with lust’, picking up two girls on the Ponte Vecchio, and Horace Walpole, entranced by the music of the Carnival, strolling across the Ponte Santa Trinita in straw hat and linen dressing-gown; officers of the occupying Austrian army lounging in their white

  Florence by night from the Boboli Gardens.

  uniforms at the tables outside the Caffè Doney, and Cossacks spearing salami as they gallop headlong through the Mercato Nuovo; W. M. Thackeray writing a poem about the delicious fish soup at the Ristorante Laura, and Walter Savage Landor so disgusted by a meal in his pensione that he throws it out of a window; Mrs Browning welcoming guests to tea at the Casa Guidi and taking them for walks in the Boboli Gardens, and Henry James at Bellosguardo, looking up from his work on The Aspern Papers to gaze upon ‘the most beautiful view in the world’; Queen Victoria in her carriage holding up a miniature of Prince Albert towards the recently completed façade of Santa Maria del Fiore; the monks of Santa Croce, using tables as rafts, struggling to save their precious manuscripts from the swirling waters of the flood; and Timoteo Lucaroni dredging from the mud of the Arno's bed Francavilla's long-lost statue of Primavera, a resurrected symbol of the resilient city's long and glorious past.