Florence (11 page)

No message reached her from outside except an insolent letter from a Fascist female, wife of an art critic, telling her she had only got what she deserved, she might have been treated much worse, with the slogan ‘
Il Duce ha sempre ragione’
(‘The Leader is always right’) appended to her florid signature. When my mother’s maid telephoned a powerful friend for help, he snapped back at her: ‘Don’t you realize that we are at war and that Mrs Acton is an enemy alien?’ That distinguished official had been a frequent guest in our house for a quarter of a century.

As a coda to this story, James Lord notes a detail that Acton, for the sake of
bella figura,
left out: in fact, the problem with Hortense Acton’s passport was not an invention; she had altered ‘the date of her birth to make herself appear a decade younger. Why she should have cared what customs officials and frontier police knew her age to be is a mystery, but a very significant clue must be looked for in the vanity and arrogance of the lady in question. Tampering with a passport, even for such a frivolous reason, may be considered a serious matter …’

In the event, as soon as she got out of jail, Mrs Acton left for Switzerland.

At last war broke out; by then all but the most entrenched colonists had, quite sensibly,
fled Italy, though a few refused to abandon their houses, most notably the Jewish Bernard Berenson, who eventually had to go into hiding in the countryside. In his autobiographical film
Tea with Mussolini,
the director Franco Zeffirelli portrays a group of elderly English ladies – the sort for whom the adjective ‘indomitable’ is inevitably trotted out – who stick it out in Florence after war is declared and are consequently sent by the military to a makeshift prison in the hill town of San Gimignano. The film’s climactic sequence, in which Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright quite literally interpose themselves between the village’s famous medieval towers and the Germans who intend to bomb them – thus saving art from history – makes for a camp spectacle that recalls some of the graver excesses committed by Zeffirelli in his career as an opera director; yet as a fantasy, it also highlights the intensity of the foreign community’s devotion to the country they had adopted – and that they believed had adopted them.

In the end, the worst loss was that of the bridges that crossed the Arno, some of them
hundreds of years old, and all of them, with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio, blown up by the Germans on 4 August 1944. Earlier the Swiss Consul, Karl Steinhauslin (after whom a Florentine bank is now named), had pleaded that the statues of the
Four Seasons
on the Ponte Santa Trinità be spared; they were not. After the liberation, divers scoured the bottom of the Arno for the statues, even as members of the all black American 387th Engineer Battalion set to work building temporary Bailey bridges of wood and steel in order to reconnect the two halves of the severed city. Eventually all four seasons were found, with the exception of spring’s head, at which point, Mary McCarthy recounts in
The Stones of Florence,
a rumor began circulating that ‘an American Negro soldier had been seen carrying it away during the fighting and confusion’. Posters went up all over the city, featuring a photograph of the statue, asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and offering a three-thousand–dollar reward for her safe return. But the head failed to reappear, and in 1958, after a precise replica of the bridge was built using precise replicas of sixteenth-century tools, the
authorities had no choice but to return a headless spring to her old position on the northeast corner. (Only three years later, during work on the Ponte Vecchio, did the head turn up; it had not, as rumor claimed, been smuggled off to Harlem, or New Zealand, or buried in the Boboli Gardens, but had been at the bottom of the river all along.)

Today, although all the bridges that the Germans destroyed have been rebuilt, not all the Bailey bridges have been taken down; indeed, there is one near Galluzzo, on the outskirts of Florence, that we cross every time we leave to go to the country. Its wooden boards make a racket when the wheels of the car pass over them; we feel, for a few seconds, a worrisome vibration … and then we’re on solid ground again. Every time this happens I think, for a moment, of the liberation I wasn’t alive to witness, its much-heralded scenes – American soldiers giving chewing gum to children – as well as those that remain unnarrated: the black members of the 387th Engineering Batallion, prohibited from actually fighting because of their race, and now going quietly about the unglamorous
job of making the city whole again. Little is recalled of them, yet they did as much to save Florence as any foreigner ever has, as much as Berenson, or Henry James, or Zeffirelli’s histrionic old Englishwomen. May their story, in all its amplitude, someday be told.

A river city, by its very nature, is a double city, and in this regard Florence is a cousin to Paris, Rome and Budapest; that is to say, in Florence, there are not so much two equal sides as a principal side and an ‘other’ side: just as Rome has Trastevere, Paris its
rive gauche
and Buda its Pest, Florence has the
Oltr’arno
– literally ‘across the Arno’ – a poorer zone with smaller houses, wandered by writers and drug addicts, butting up against the countryside.
Oltr’arno
’s heart is Piazza Santo Spirito, which, with its used-record shops and student bars, resembles more than any other part of Florence the Latin Quarter of Paris, despite the comparative remoteness of the university, which is to be found on the principal side of the Arno, the unnamed side, not far from Piazza Santissima Annunziata. Here, one Sunday a month, organic farmers from the Mugello and Chianti, many of them
ex-hippies who passed their youth in these bars, gather to stage a market at which they sell honey and beeswax candles, homemade jam, wholegrain bread, clothes and leather goods, as well as flavorful, if not very pretty, vegetables. In contrast to the Duomo and Santa Croce, the severe façades of which were done up during Florence’s brief period as a capital, the church of Santo Spirito has a stark, unadorned front that suggests the asceticism of earlier centuries. In 1980, an artist’s co-operative headed by Mario Mariotti decided to redress this oversight by projecting on to Santo Spirito all manner of designs for a possible new façade; these included a fried egg (Gianni Melotti), a record album showing Nipper, emblem of ‘His Master’s Voice’ (Gesù Moctezuma), wrapping paper (Christo, of course), and, most sportively, the interior of the church projected on to its exterior (Marianna Gagliardi).

Now as then, young foreigners love
Oltr’arno.
Even the stuffy Henry James, visiting Florence in his youth, stayed near the Ponte Vecchio on the
Oltr’arno
side. ‘My room at the inn looked out on the river and was flooded all day with sunshine,’ he wrote.

There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of extreme antiquity, bulging and protruding over the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river, while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow medieval street.)

All this ‘brightness and yellowness’ was for James ‘a part of that indefinably charming colour which Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the river, and from the bridges and quays’. He writes of the Arno’s ‘silvered yellow’, just as Acton describes its water as being ‘a mellow yellow in the evening light; were it a little less muddy, it would pass for Orvieto wine’. Pictures from as late as the end of the nineteenth century show children and young men fishing in the river, or diving off the bridges to swim. All long gone: today, though canoes and skiffs ply its waters, no one would dare dive into the Arno; nor would a health-conscious person
want to eat a fish caught in it. During the hottest part of the summer, the water level drops, the river becomes stagnant, sludge-green (I have never seen it yellow) and musky. Mice and rats scurry in the shallows and bats fly overhead in the muggy air.
(’Guarda,
it is so romantic, with the full moon and the
topi
swimming in the river!’ waxes our friend from Cozensa, the one who likes to dress as Cardinal Richelieu.) In the winter, on the other hand, when the rains come, the Arno is cappuccino-colored; it rushes violently, carrying oak and chestnut branches downstream from its source in the Mugello.

Flood is a constant threat. Although the Arno has overflowed its banks on dozens of occasions over the centuries, the worst floods have tended to take place at hundred-year intervals, usually in years with double or even triple digits: 1333, 1466, 1557, 1844, 1966. (The superstitious Florentine looks forward to another disastrous
alluvione
in 2055 or 2077.) These floods can start up with little or no warning. The flood of 4 November 1966 started off the night before as a heavy rain, and only began to threaten in the early hours
of the morning. By two a.m., the owners of some of the jewelry stores on the Ponte Vecchio, having been alerted by the night watchman on the bridge, were hurrying to their shops to rescue what they could of their stock. There was some worry that the ancient bridge itself might collapse, though it had survived other floods as well as the war. One shopkeeper later recalled seeing a Fiat 1100 butting at the window of his store.

More than 15,000 cars were destroyed during the flood. Perhaps because the average Florentine, in 1966, took great pride in owning a car – even a tiny, pumpkin-colored Fiat 500 – television footage shot in the immediate aftermath of the disaster has a curiously obsessive quality, as it bypasses churches and monuments to move from car to car to car: upturned, floating, muddrenched, oil-drenched. There is something funereal about this photographic record, the pictures of destroyed cars recalling the snapshots of the dead that Italians place on gravestones.

Less attention was paid to injured art, though in fact this was the graver consequence, since cars are replaceable and Renaissance
frescoes are not. A catalogue prepared by UNESCO offers numbing evidence of just how much was damaged: 321 paintings on wood, 413 on canvas, 11 fresco cycles, 70 individual frescoes (a total of around 3,000 square meters of fresco), 14 sculptural groups, 144 individual sculptures (including several by Michelangelo), 22 of them in wood: in all, close to a thousand works of major historical importance. The rushing waters, which reached a height of nearly six meters inside the Duomo, tore the bronze doors off the Baptistry. Once these had subsided, a slimy, corrosive mixture of heating oil and mud, in places as much as four feet deep, remained in their wake; in this
melma
several of Ghiberti’s bronze panels were found steeping the next day.

Sometimes the
melma
’s effects could be weirdly dramatic. As Guido Gerosa wrote, in the aftermath of the flood Donatello’s statue of the Magdalen ‘was transmuted into a a mask of mud … The monstrous smears of diesel fuel that furrowed her long loose hair seemed paradoxically to intensify her look of dramatic desperation.’ The same could not be
said of Cimabue’s famous Crucifix at Santa Croce, which was found broken into rubble. Nor were paintings the only precious things to suffer. A photograph taken at the Teatro Comunale shows a Steinway piano swollen from submersion and caked in mud. At the Biblioteca Nazionale, more than 700,000 rare books and manuscripts, as well as the newspaper and magazine collection, all of which had been stored in a basement, were waterlogged. On this point in particular, much criticism was leveled at the Florentine authorities, whose decision not merely to construct the library along the river banks (an absurdly vulnerable position) but to house rarities in its basement now provoked bewilderment and outrage both among Italians and foreigners. For the first time since the days when Ruskin had protested the construction of an omnibus stand in front of the bell tower, James’s ‘Florentine question’ – the question of whether the Florentines could be trusted with their own patrimony – revived noisily. In London, Sir Ashley Clarke quickly established the Italian Art and Archives Rescue Fund, under the aegis of which the restorer Nicolai Rubinstein and the art historian John
Pope-Hennessy were sent to Florence to assess the damage. Later, Pope-Hennessy would recall finding Donatello’s
Annunziazione dei Cavalcanti,
in the nave of Santa Croce, ‘soaked with oil to the level of the Virgin’s knees’.

In addition to Santa Croce, the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella and the Ognissanti had been submerged to a level of four meters. There had been damage at the Casa Buonarroti and the Museo Horne, as well as the Museum of the History of Science, the Archaeological Museum, the Bargello and in the restoration workshops on the ground floor of the Uffizi.

Even as Italian television continued to focus compulsively on wrecked cars, both within Italy and abroad a grassroots rescue movement was beginning to take shape. The men and women, most of them young, who came to Florence by the thousands to volunteer in the digging out would later be dubbed the
angeli del fango,
or ‘mud angels’. (Their number included the pianist Sviatoslov Richter.) Senator Edward Kennedy, in Geneva when the flood occurred, recalled flying into Florence
for the day. Arriving at the Biblioteca around five in the afternoon, he discovered masses of students up to their waists in water, working by candlelight. ‘They had formed a line to pass along the books,’ he wrote, ‘so that they could be retrieved from the water and then handed on to a safer area to have preservatives put on them.’

Everywhere I looked in the great main reading room, there were hundreds and hundreds of young people who had all gathered to help.

It was as if they knew that this flooding of the library was putting their souls at risk. I found it incredibly inspiring to see this younger generation all united in this vital effort … I was still shivering as I boarded the plane that took me back to Geneva, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the impressive solemnity of that scene – of all those students, oblivious to the biting cold and the muddy water, quietly concentrating on saving books in the flickering candlelight. I will never forget it.