FLORENCE FLOOD
4 NOVEMBER 1966
Enlarge Piazza Signoria and the Loggia della Lanza
Many books enter the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' from its rule
that to be a member one gives it a book. Among them were packages of
twentieth-century postcards in black and white of Florence's 1966
Flood. They, too, could have easily been thrown away. They are, like
the sepia nineteenth-century photographs, digitized here as documentary
evidence of that cultural disaster. As a scholar, time and time again,
I found that a book I needed at the Biblioteca Nazionale had been
'alluvionato', likewise a precious document in the Archivio di Stato,
in which case I had to rely on a poor nineteenth-century transcription.
The magnificent manuscripts in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana were
safe, shelved high above the flood waters. Not so the splendid
collection of nineteenth-century first editions shelved below street
level in the Gabrinetto Vieusseux and brought up by a dumb waiter
system. Those books could not possibly be saved in time amidst the
rising flood waters. I begged the Harold Acton Library of the British
Institute not to shelve their books so on sliding bookcases down at
river level, for these will be lost in the next flood. I remember in
1966, in Berkeley, my professor breaking down in tears as she told us
what was happening in her Florence. In 2006 the Comune of Florence
showed Franco Zefirelli's heart-rending film in the Palazzo Vecchio's
Salone dei Cinquecento that had been made in 1966 to raise funds for
the cleaning of books, frescoes, statues, buildings. It showed the 'Mud
Angels', young people from all over the world, labouring tirelessly at
the task of cleaning treasures in time from mildew and oil. Filmed in
black and white, over and over again beauty would break through the
ugliness of the event, the loss of memory refound, restored, through a
love of the place, a love for Florence that was, is, and will be global.
FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA
BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO
ASSOCIATION,
1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY
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