Words by Carla Passino
In the grey dawn of November 4, 1966, after days of incessant rain and violent storms, the Arno river surged over its banks and covered Florence in an ocean of water and mud. As the city’s newspapers titled, it was “the greatest tragedy in seven centuries,” which killed more than thirty people, destroyed homes, roads and bridges and damaged thousands of manuscripts and works of art.
Some forty later, Dark Waters, by historian and author Robert Clark, remembers those dramatic days of the flood and the silver lining that came with them—the thousands of young volunteers who flocked to Florence from every corner of the world to help rescue the city and its artistic treasures, quickly earning the nickname of Angeli del Fango, mud angels.
It was by chance that America-born Clark became aware of the flood and what it really meant. Of course he knew of it and, having lived in Florence for a while, had often come across the numerous inscriptions and thick red lines, etched five to six metres above the ground on walls across the city, which stated that “on November 4, the Arno waters reached this height.”
But it is only when he saw an old photograph, hanging off a wall in the trattoria that had become his usual lunching spot, of a car floating above the restaurant’s awning that he realised what the flood was really like—a dark river of devastation that nearly overcame Florence. This moment of understanding is the spark behind his book, which is a reflection on art, beauty and the grit of people determined to rescue their world from annihilation.
Clark starts slow, with a cavalcade across Florence’s history, its relationship with the Arno river, and the world’s relationship with the city. But he soon changes pace and his description of the flood through the word of first-hand witnesses is spellbinding. The slow, agonizing death of an old wheel-chair bound lady who couldn’t be freed from her home and was hoisted up with a makeshift rope towards the ceiling while the police went to look for help—except that the rising waters reached her before aid did.
The brave sacrifice of a pumping station employee, who died while giving a telephone account to a newspaper reporter; when the reporter urged him to leave and save himself, he said he could not abandon his place—and soon afterwards, while he was still on the phone, a roaring wave of water and mud took his life. Or the daring escape of the History of Science Museum’s director who fled a flooded building through the rooftops, carrying Galileo’s telescope with him.
Beyond the human tragedy, though, there was also the artistic disaster to contend with and it was this, says Clark, that moved the world—the debris covering Ponte Vecchio, the torn panels of the Baptistery’s doors lying in mud, the branches and water clogging Piazza Santa Croce.
“By the end of the day of November 5,” he recalls, “most of the city's museums and churches were either still inaccessible or uninspected, but some 14,000 movable artworks would prove to be damaged or destroyed, sixteen miles of shelved documents and records in the State Archives had gone underwater; three to four million books and manuscripts had been flooded, including 1.3 million volumes at the Biblioteca Nazionale and its catalog of eight million cards; the rare book and literary collections of the Vieusseux Library on the Palazzo Strozzi had been completely inundated, with book covers and pages stuck to the ceiling; and unknown millions of dollars' worth of antiques and objets from Florence's antiquarian shops were destroyed, swept away, looted, or otherwise missing.”
This incalculable loss mobilized students, conservators and art lovers from around the world, who made their way to Florence in an attempt to help. Clark tells many of their stories: from the American artists who braved the waterclogged city with their child to bear witness to what had happened, to the Courtauld Institute student who took off for Florence on the very day of the flood, “but not before going to his family's farm to round up all the pumps and hoses he could lay his hands on. Driving day and night across the continent in a Land Rover, he was at the doors of the Uffizi twenty-four hours later.”
But because this is both a history book and a memoir, and not an easy tale of triumph over tragedy, Clark doesn’t shirk away from the politics and the controversy that mired the rescue efforts—one for all, the bitter debate on how to save Cimabue’s Crocefisso, most of which had been lost to the fury of the waters. The work was assigned to young conservator Ornella Casazza, and many people cried foul, saying she had been chosen because she was having an extramarital relationship with Belle Arti boss Umberto Baldini (whom she later married). Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of her methods, her restoration was, and to an extent still is, highly criticized.
Despite these intrigues, though, Clark’s book ends on a positive note - art matters to people even in the wake of tragedy, and beauty conquers everything, even devastation.
If you are looking for a fast-paced adventure novel disguised as non-fiction - this isn’t it. But if you are after a no holds barred account of what happened in Florence in 1966, and don’t mind some personal reflections, slow passages and scholarly details, this is a gripping read.
Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence is available in paperback from 9 October. Order through Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, through the links below.
