The Florence Flood

This 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!

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There 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.

Archive link for this entry: The Florence Flood of November 1966 | Comments (0)

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.

Estimates suggest that 14,000 movable works of art were damaged, plus three or four million books and manuscripts."

The whole article is only about a page long, but it is an excellent primer on the flood.

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