The Flood

One final post of the trip.

As you walk around Florence occasionally, if you look up, you’l

l see plaques that marks the height of the flood waters during the 1966 flood. Some of these must have been 15 feet high – easily covering the entire first floor of all the buildings in the area.

In November 1966 the Arno River broke its banks and flooded the entire city. The flooding started in the middle of the night and residents woke in the morning to find their cars floating in the streets and most of the bridges washed away.  There were some early warning signs. Around midnight, the night guard at the Ponte Vecchio noticed the bridge was shaking and called all the owners of the jewelry shops that line the bridge and told them to come get their gold. The head of art restoration at the Uffizi was notified of the rising water and got a team over to the museum to move what they could from the basement to higher ground. Luckily, most of the Renaissance masterpieces are housed on the third-floor of the museum and were safe. The rising waters carried debris from up river and mixed with the heating oil almost every Florentine stores in their basement covering the entire city in a slick muddy gunk.

Thirty-three people were killed during the flood and hundreds of pieces art were damaged or destroyed. Florence’s ‘National Biblotecha” thier version of the Library of Congress was completely submerged and thousands of historical manuscripts were ruined.

The flood received huge media attention around the world and hundreds of young people, most art students, came to the city to work on the recovery and restoration of the cities treasures. Called “Mud Angels”, they worked for months, sometimes years on projects helping to scrape mold off of paintings or drying out manuscripts for free.

The poster child for the restoration efforts after the flood was the Chimabue Cross that hung in the rectory of the Santa Croce church. The Santa Croce area is the poorest area of Florence and the lowest area of the city (think Katrina). Much of the church was submerged and this cross was heavily damaged in the process. 

The cross never had much artistic significance. Art historians considered it a minor work and Vassari himself removed the cross from the main nave of the church to place it in a lesser location in the rectory. However, the Life Magazine photographs of the water-logged cruciform being removed from the church encompassed the tragedy of the flood and it became the symbol of disaster. Years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, were spent restoring the minor art work that now has cult status.

The flood happened in November and a story is told that at Christmas a man hung a stocking full of coal on the Ponte Vecchio bridge with a note to the Arno that said – “You have been very bad this year.”