“THE CURSED DITCH”-I FLORENCE’S FLOOD DROWNED A BODY OF ITALIAN CULTURE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31230, 30 November 1966, Page 16

“THE CURSED DITCH”-I FLORENCE’S FLOOD DROWNED A BODY OF ITALIAN CULTURE

((By

ROBERT HUGHES

in the ‘‘Spdnep Morninp Herald")

(Reprinted bg arrangement)

From Fiesole early in the morning, Florence looks unchanged. One thing is missing—the sound of bells. The bells of Giotto Campanile; with their different notes and odd names (The Fat One, The Wine Bibber, The Discontented One, The Fig) are silent for the perverse reason that there is no electricity to turn the motors which move them.

Slowly, after two weeks, Florence is beginning to return from the worst disaster in its history.

There are conflicting stories about the flood. It came somewhere around 5.30 in the morning of Friday of November 4. Northern Tuscany had received two solid weeks of rain, and the Arno, which flows through the centre of Florence was swollen. At dusk on Thursday it was running a few feet below the top of the Arches of the Santa Trinita bridge. During the night it rose two feet below the level of the parapet. Spray broke over Ponte Carraia: cars stalled. No Official Warning There was no official flood warning, but the jewellers who had shops on the Ponte Vecchio began to remove their stock in baskets and wheel-barrows by ten o’clock on Thursday night. By some accounts, water was gnawing at the back windows of their shops by 3 a.m. But nearly everyone in Florence was asleep, and so only a few people saw the eight foot wave which three hours later, drove a bore of water down river at 30 m.p.h., broke over the parapets, smashed , through the Ponte Vecchio, gutted every building for two miles on either side of the Arno and paralysed the city.

Professor Becharucchi, the director of conservation at the Uffizi Gallery, was woken at 7 a.m. by a policeman on duty at the Via Della Nine. By then, the Uffizi Gallery was already flooding. The building resembles a long “u,” with its base facing the river and its prongs pointing towards the Piazza Signoria. The Uffizi courtyard is four feet below road level and so 12 feet under the water line: the water filled it at once, and, in less than two hours, a mixture of water, clay, mud, and heavy oil from the heating equipment from basements further up the river had broken through the Uffizi’s main door.

By 8 a.m., the Uffizi staff, headed by Professor Becharucchi and Professor Ugo Procacci, were frantically dragging pictures from the basement—l3oo paintings, left there for storage and repairs. The Uffizi basements filled to the ceiling with a glutinous slime. But the part of the Uffizi which suffered most was also the least publicised part—the State archives. One and a half million volumes were stored there. They took up 400 rooms. Of these, 40 rooms, all on the ground floor, were drenched in five feet of mud and oil. Forty thousand vellum-bound folios, which

held 50 million documents were submerged. It is still too early to guess the damage to these. The archives contain the entire recorded history of Florence for the last 900 years. No Duplicates No duplicates exist. What is certain is that no future history of renaissance Italy can be written without them —and that only a fraction of them, maybe 2 per cent, have been exhausted by historians. Ink runs: paper rots. When 1 arrived in Florence, on November 8, four days after the flood, the work of saving the archives had only just begun. There was no electricity—all the sub-stations were underground and therefore flooded. Thirty thousand cars had been wrecked and petrol from burst tanks had flowed into the underground electric conduits so that nothing could be switched on for fear of a spark and a chain of explosions. The American army base at Livorno did something to break this vicious circle by bringing two petrol generators to light the Uffizi basements. In the roar of two-stroke engines and the broken yellow light of 20-watt bulbs, chains of students were working up to their knees in mud, passing sodden bricks of icecold vellum up a narrow stair, three storeys high to the top floor of the Uffizi. There, in Vasari’s Hallucinatory Galleries, room after room, arch after arch, the remains of Florentine history were laid out in piles. In the loggia below, I saw six men, three to a battering ram, smashing down the huge carved 16th century oak doors which led to another part of the archives. Sawdust and blotting paper were needed to dry the books, but by November 8 there was no more sawdust, and all the blotting paper in Tuscany was exhausted by November 10. There were no air-condi-tioners, humidifiers, heating tables—nothing to dry the books slowly so that their leaves did not glue into a solid lump. Nothing but manual labour from hundreds of Italian, American and English students, and ironically blue sky and 12,000 typhoid and tetanus shots brought by an English doctor. They were needed. Sewers burst and the mud stank.

There was danger of typhoid fever (luckily no cases so far have been reported) and a brief epidemic of infectious hepatitis. There was no drinking water anywhere in Florence. In the worst hit area around Santa Croce, the city slopes down from the Arna banks, and the water rose to 20 feet. Twenty-nine people died: mostly women who refused to leave their flats, or men who were trapped in their cars in the streets or on the bridges. By the third day rats were scurrying out of the pipes: one bit off a baby’s ear. The Meat Market The meat market behind the Santa Croce was flooded to 16 feet. When I tried to drive through on the sixth day after the flood the stench of rotting flesh was unendurable even with all the car windows closed. Soldiers in gas masks were loading the slimy black hams, the decaying carcases of sheep and cows into'trucks: later they were carted outside the city and destroyed, 10,000 of them, with flame throwers and napalm. The Biblioteca Nazionale, or National Library, stands on the banks of the Arno in the Santa Croce quarter, just around the corner from the Church of Santa Croce itself. It contained 5 million books —the greatest library of Italian literature and source material in the world, containing everything from illuminated medieval manuscripts to a complete set of each newspaper published in Italy from 1875 on. All of this was underground the basements were flooded to the ceilings: and water swirled eight feet high through the ground floor. The official estimate is that 300,000 books were destroyed. Students working to clear a basement put the figure higher at nearly one million books. The Magliabechiano Collection and the Palatine I Collection, thousands of irrei placeable volumes from the 115th and 16th centuries were (wiped out. Thirty thousand volumes of newspapers and journals were destroyed. Twenty thousand folios of magazines were damaged. The National Library will not open again for years. Probably, the >modern history of Italy can< i never be written now.

But these statistics give no | idea of what the National (Library looked like; or, perhaps, what the loss means, you have to imagine the British Museum library drowned in mud. In a labyrinth of subterranean rooms, dark, with mud to your knees, a landscape of buckled shells, empty, gaping, and piles of documents mixed Into the mud: the stench of old dish rags pervading the immense building, the pyramid of sodden books 10 feet high, the patient students who came in their hundreds from all parts

|of Italy and even from London to separate the pages, one by one, sponge each page down, and lay it between two sheets of blotting paper. They began to empty the stacks of the National Library on November 6. And the last book was expected to come out of those mephitic basements on November 27. For three weeks oil and chemicals will have been eating into it. From Dante “It’s like something from Dante,” whispered an appalled Belgium radio commentator as 1 showed him around the Library basements. And so it was: only, instead of the souls of gluttons weltering in cold mud, it is the body of Italian culture. Fifty miles of bookshelves in the National Library were destroyed. In the Strozzi Palace, the Vieusseux Library, containing 250.000 books was drowned in water and oil; this was the most complete collection of romantic European literature, from the 18th to 20th century in existence and it is irreplacable.

The University of Florence sustained losses which were provisionally set at 1,322.000,000 lire—about £1 million worth of books, scientific equipment and furniture, not including damage to its buildings. Even the guinea pigs and rabbits in the Zoology department drowned in their cages as the Arno flooded the laboratories. There is not a single archive or library in Florence which has escaped the flood waters. And not all the costs are known yet. For instance, the most optimistic estimate for the damage to the Uffizi Library (which does not of course include the cost of the documents themselves, which are unique, and therefore priceless) is 300,000,000 lire, or nearly £250,000. The Berensen Library in the faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University was wiped out, but those 50,000 books are only a fraction of the whole damage—which at present, stands at 800,000 volumes. It may be that this figure is too conservative specially since it does not include the material in Church archives.

The appalling lesson of Florence is that the past can be erased. The mud and oil have obliterated things of which we did not know and now will never know: things which might never have existed. Dante, in the Inferno, called the river Arno “La Maledetta E Invidia Fossa”, The Cursed and Spiteful Ditch. It has now caused the greatest disaster to western civilisation since the Second World War. The wiry, sardonic spirit of the Florentines has not been crushed by it: but no amount of morale can bring back the lost books. A Few Lights When I came to Florence this time, I had to get a special pass even to enter the city ant' there, at night, in the pitch-dark streets, deep in mud and strewn with garbage, broken furniture, wrecked cars and swollen carcases, where nothing moved except groups of police on guard against looters, with searchlights waving their white lunatic beams across the inlaid facade of Santa Croce, it seemed that Florence would never recover. A fortnight later, some of the 6000 gutted shops have opened again: there are a few lights in the market, tables are full of water-logged leather work and gilded baubles at discount prices, but underneath the buzz of Florence's tortuous economic revival, there is still the invisible blurring of ink and degeneration of paper in a million closed books, the inaudible creak of ancient lime-wood panels contracting as they dry, and the flaking of paint, gold-leaf, gesso, and marble. You feel impotent. “Every night from now on,” a restorer in the Uffizi, Professor Giovannia Costato, told me, "a few hundred thousand words will disappear for ever. Some 14th century paintings will be —pouf—that much further from recovery. I can feel Florence leaking away.”