This short film utilizes images from florence-flood.com that were taken by Joe Blaustein, that we helped to surface and bring to the world, and other sources, including some shots I have never seen before. It is really worth a watch, and a very nice job by Diane Guerrazzi, Professor at San Jose State University School of Journalism & Mass Communications.

This article was originally published in National Geographic magazine in the July, 1967 issue and features several color photographs.

The small attic apartment that Swietlan Kraczyna shared with his wife and baby daughter in Florence did not have heating, but it had a great view of the Arno river. It was nearly dawn 50 years ago on Friday, when the immense sound of water rushing through the three arches of the Ponte Santa Trinita made the artist, who usually worked at night, look out the window.

What followed - the great flood of Florence - would be remembered for decades as the worst natural disaster to lay siege to the city at the heart of the Renaissance. Dozens of lives were lost, great works of art destroyed or nearly destroyed, and a million books in the city's low-lying Biblioteca Nazionale were submerged.

Kraczyna, who was living on a shoestring at the time and worried about having enough food for his family, grabbed his camera and headed for the streets with just 16 shots left in his roll of film.

FLORENCE, ITALY -- In early morning light, the low buildings lining both sides of the Arno River here glow in their myriad shades of ochre, like the shallow river itself, which flows calmly through the city.


When I was here on Nov. 4, 1966, with my husband-to-be on our first trip to Europe together, it was quite a different sight. It had rained for days, and, totally saturated, the water table rose up; the river, coursing angrily with a release from an upriver dam, overflowed its retaining walls into the streets. Stranded in our hotel along the river, I looked down from a second-floor interior balcony and saw that the water had risen frighteningly to the ceiling of the lobby. I asked for two candles, two bottles of water and a couple of packets of breadsticks.

Would the foundation of the old building collapse? I took two flat wooden drawers from the armoire and placed them by the window in case we needed flotation devices. Then we took turns sleeping until dawn broke. Outside, large metal drums of heating oil, already topped off for winter, were swept into the Arno and banged all night against the bridges. Otherwise, all was ghostly quiet. By the next morning, the headline in La Notte described the scene: "Florence -- City of Ghosts."

I can't find anything official about it on the Palazzo Vecchio website - many of these Florence museum websites are unfortunately woefully maintained.

Obviously taken on November 4th, 1966 - it is a view towards Piazza Santa Trìnita from the Arno. You can see two figures walking in waist to chest-high water.

There are literally of hundreds of slides and photos in this archive that have probably never been seen by the public.

In Waters Rising: Letters from Florence, renowned calligrapher Sheila Waters recounts the story of the role that her husband Peter Waters (1930–2003) played as the person in charge of organizing the monumental efforts to save severely damaged books in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (National Library, Florence) after the devastating flood in 1966 fifty years ago. To give the most complete picture of the events that occurred initially in the recovery mission, Sheila presents nearly 50 of Peter’s letters written between the end of November 1966 and April 1967, in which he describes day-to-day happenings, and her letters back, which kept him informed about things at home and boosted his confidence when problems seemed to be overwhelming.

In addition to these letters and Sheila’s narrative diary and timeline of events, Randy Silverman, Head of Preservation, University of Utah, has written a thought-provoking introduction that puts those conservation efforts into the context of today’s practices. Also, Valerii P. Leonov has written an appreciation of Peter’s assistance in the aftermath of a fire in 1988 that ravaged the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The accompanying DVD features a digital remastering of Roger Hill’s film Restoration of Books, Florence, 1968. Waters Rising is dedicated to the people whose names appear herein and to those unnamed Mud Angels who salvaged the books that the flood waters left behind.

In 2016, conservators around the world will be focusing on those events that occurred 50 years ago because in many ways the work that Waters and his colleagues initiated then gave birth to modern book conservation.

Nearly five decades have passed since the Arno River in Florence, Italy, flooded its banks on November 4, 1966, breaching the basements and first floors of museums, libraries, and private residences, and burying centuries of books, manuscripts, and works of art in muck and muddy water. The natural disaster of the Florence Flood galvanized a fledgling conservation community into action. In the intervening decades, successive generations of professionals have advanced the practice of conservation and preservation, imbuing the profession with a global view of the value of cultural heritage and fully embracing the technical details of materials science. The fields of library and archive preservation and conservation are committed to preventing future disasters while focusing on triage decision-making and cost-effective action in the face of continuing natural and human-made disasters.

Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
913 S. University Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI
Thursday and Friday
3-4 November 2016

More information and registration link here.

The thing that intrigued me most about that particular color photograph however was what I learned after this blog helped discover and publicize the color photos of Joseph Blaustein - that most Florentines are under the impression that color photos of the flood did not exist.

This summer I visited the Library of Congress where I found an article in the archives from National Geographic, "Florence Rises From the Flood", that is literally full of color photos from several photographers. This is the cover page of the article:

As this weeks ends on the 50th anniversary of the epic deluge of Florence, I will be posting more images and excerpts from the article, and some images from the Korab archives, as well as news of the coverage of this years events.