Home | November 2006 »October 28, 2006Florence Flood Calendar of EventsThe Comune, along with the offices of the Regione Toscana and the Provincia di Firenze have published a booklet of events surrounding the anniversary of the flood. The PDF file (Italian only) is here. There are dozens of things happening, including a full slate on November the 4th at the Palazzo Vecchio. Below is the cover image.  October 23, 2006Online exhibition of the flood of 1966
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (German Art History Library) has a new site up with an exhibition of the flood. There are some very moving images of the town, and of specific buildings and works of art. Due to its geographical location, Florence has often been the victim of flooding. In more recent years, the 1844 flood has left a particularly lasting memory, even though the peak of the flooding remained significantly below the peak recorded on November 4, 1966. The photographs taken in these dramatic circumstances serve as silent but impressive witnesses of the history of Florence. The staggering damage to the famous Ponte Vecchio illustrates the extent of the flood catastrophe. Thanks to Alexandra in the comments for letting us know about this. October 21, 2006Americans Who Helped in the Florence Flood Rescue EffortThis article is about 10 years old, but contains some good facts about people coming to Florence to help with the clean up and restoration: On arriving in Florence, he was astounded by the immensity of the task. Something like a million books from the BNC alone, including hundreds of thousands of old and rare books, had been damaged by the flood. Although all the books had been dried by early 1967, he estimated that it would take a staff of about 100 working on book restoration for another 20 years at the Library just to undo the worst of what the Arno River had done in minutes. That was a conservative estimate, as they are still restoring books 40 years later! October 20, 2006The Day Modern Art Conservation Was BornI have been having a hard time finding news about upcoming events for the 40th anniversary of the flood but stumbled on one this morning: New York University’s Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, and Villa la Pietra, NYU’s 57-acre campus in Florence, in a joint American-Italian venture with Mayor Leonardo Domenici of Florence and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro will mark the 40th anniversary of the Florence Flood with an international symposium to be held in Florence, Italy. Entitled Conservation Legacies of “l’Alluvione,” the event will take place at the Villa la Pietra and the Palazzo Vecchio on November 10 and 11, 2006, and feature a keynote address by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The whole release/article is here. October 10, 2006Photographs of the floodMega.it has a special section with photos of the flood, captioned in English. Not the most user friendly page, and the photos are not that large, but still a good resource. The Florence Flood of November 1966There is a really good paper about the flood here. Unfortunately it is a PDF file and not so easy to navigate (the best thing would be to download the file and view it with a PDF viewer - like Adobe Acrobat - or print it out). This paper is the transcript of a lecture with slides given by Christopher Clarkson in 2003. Clarkson was in Florence in 1966 and worked on rescuing books at The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze first hand. This is probably one of the best source materials on the web for the Florence flood and a very compelling read. October 06, 2006How many people died in the flood of florence?It is pretty hard to find the answer to this question on the web. Most of the history of the flood centers around the damage done to Florence's works of art, but there was also a tragic human toll to the flood. Channel 4 from England has a website devoted to history, and in the section called "Cities and disaster" we found this: "At least 30 people died, and 50,000 families were made homeless. There was a food shortage, 15,000 wrecked cars were strewn about the streets and 6,000 shops went out of business. The whole article is only about a page long, but it is an excellent primer on the flood. October 05, 2006Florence Flood of 1966 MP3This is pretty interesting - both the idea (MP3 audio tours to play on your iPod - I thought that was my original idea!) and the content - an audio tour that takes you through Florence and the flood of 1966. We haven't heard this yet - but if anyone does buy this or has heard it in the past, we would like to know what you think (you can tell us in the comments). This (I suppose) is a sample of the tour:
The Sixteen Pleasures
October 04, 2006Video of Piazza Santa Croce after the floodGetty Images has some archival footage of Florence right after the flood (click the above image to play the video). You can watch the clips on their site - or if you are a film maker you can buy what you need for your project. The shot above is a quick scan of Piazza Santa Croce. You can see the church of Santa Croce in the background, and when the camera starts to pan, on the right is Palazzo Antellesi. The statue of Dante, now in front of the church, was still in the middle of the piazza in 1966. The Flood of 1966Coming soon - news, information, archives, links, photos and video of the flood of 1966. This year is the 40 year anniversary of the flood of the Arno that ravaged Florence. | 
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"Santa Croce was the first populated area to be overflowed by the flood. This area remained under the water longer compared to the others because it's lower with respect to the river. The Arno river completely filled the Cloister, it penetrated into the crypt, it disrupted the tombs of the Church. The works of removing the mud and the rubble took about two months. But the damages didn't finish here: the Franciscan fathers and those in charge of the Belle Arti saw the most devastating reality: the Crucifix by Cimabue, located in the Museum inside the big Franciscan refectory, was destroyed. Among great difficulties the heavy painted cross, drenched with water, was brought down and laid in a horizontal position. It took six hours to accomplish this difficult task, while the flakes of colour detached and fell in the mud. The mud was sieved and some fragments were recovered."