Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (22 page)

Farnesi paused to look up at the American officer in his dusty uniform. Keller couldn’t decide whether his look was sad or accusatory, or whether he was just thankful someone was listening. “In the night, the Piazza dei Miracoli seemed to bleed in the vermilion color of the flames; the Duomo, the Baptistery, and the Campanile . . . were there, solemn, almost tinted with blood, to witness the tragic destiny of their brother, minor in age but not in beauty, who was perishing and was irredeemably consumed.”

Anyone who loved culture or history would have had a difficult time being unmoved by the sight of the ruins of the Camposanto: the fire-blackened walls, the charred timbers, the cracked tombs. How hard must it have been for this man who had dedicated his life to its care?

Farnesi started again, “I saw again the visitors and the numerous caravans of Italians and foreigners who, dazzled by so much harmony, by so much splendor, remained rapt and astonished by such luminous beauty in the admiration of what was the most beautiful cemetery in the World.”

KELLER, TOO, LOOKED
at the shattered pieces of frescoed plaster that covered the floor of the Camposanto and reflected on past events. He thought of the women in Naples, carrying buckets of rubble while their babies sat in the ruins. He thought of the town of Itri, shattered on the side of a steep hill, and the Italian refugees he had found living in caves and eating grasshoppers to survive. He thought of the Monastery of San Martino, not one lintel of which he could find, and the town of San Miniato, on the hills outside of Florence, where twenty-seven civilians were killed when a mine detonated inside the cathedral into which they had been herded by the Germans. He thought about how Florence must look without its bridges and medieval towers, whole portions of the old city reduced to dust. He thought of the reports of missing art. Michelangelo. Leonardo. Donatello. Botticelli.

What had he done in that time? He had advised. “My assignment is MFAA officer, AMG Fifth Army,” he had written his parents just weeks earlier. “I am not supposed to step out of my role. I would have
no
authority at all. The way I help is to talk with people, serve as interpreter—give help to any of the others who need it, and once in a while interject something in a meeting.”

He thought of that first dead American soldier he had seen south of Rome, a letter for his mother tucked in the lining of his helmet. That American boy had become every soldier. That village had become every terrible place he’d visited. Naples. Gaeta.

But the scenes of death that had gripped him gave way to positive images: of Sezze Romano, where fifty townspeople had followed him to his jeep, offering prayers and thanks; of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, where the monks had hidden Allied personnel amid the artwork of Siena. He remembered his joy upon hearing that Rome was virtually unharmed; the Farnese Palace in Caprarola, where seventeen cases belonging to the king were untouched; Siena’s most prized painting, Duccio’s
Maestà,
protected inside its wooden crates; Michelangelo’s
David
and the
Slaves
entombed in their beautiful, secure silos of brick.

He thought of the Cistercian Abbey at Fossanova, where Thomas Aquinas had died in 1274. He remembered again the long drive along the desolate Pontine Marshes, and his first glimpse of the abbey’s famous white walls; the arched walkway; and Don Pietro, the priest, dressed in his robes and sitting at the organ behind the High Altar playing
Ave Maria
.

Keller turned to the forlorn Farnesi and instructed him to bar entry to anyone without first obtaining his permission. He then started looking for the nearest field radio; he had to make an emergency call.

*
The influence of the Medici extended well beyond Florence. After the acquisition of Pisa, Cosimo I de’ Medici brought new life to the city in the sixteenth century with the construction of noble residences and the redesign of the Piazza dei Cavalieri by Giorgio Vasari.

18

WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN

Mid-August–October 1944

N
ew York Times
reporter Herbert Matthews observed that “Florence is no longer the Florence that the world has known for 400 years. . . . the heart of Florence is gone.” Of its six bridges—San Niccolò, alle Grazie, Vecchio, Santa Trinita, alla Carraia, and alla Vittoria, only the Ponte Vecchio survived. In fact, the Germans had rigged it with demolition charges as well. Some among the Allies theorized that the Germans had changed their plans at the last minute, perhaps concerned that the debris caused by the destruction of the two-story bridge would actually have facilitated an Allied crossing by providing enough rubble to form a new foundation in the low water of late summer.

The destruction of the bridges was a double tragedy. The one that should have been spared based on artistic merit was the Ponte Santa Trinita, not the Ponte Vecchio. Professor Friedrich Kriegbaum had argued as much to Hitler when they walked through the Vasari Corridor in 1938. Instead, German forces had spared the Ponte Vecchio by destroying the adjacent medieval
palazzi
and buildings at both ends of the bridge. Moreover, the demolition of the bridge hardly delayed the Allies at all. Hartt and others quickly found “loopholes . . . through which Allied vehicles could cross.” At 6 p.m. on August 17, a “Bailey bridge”—consisting of portable prefabricated parts—assembled atop the surviving piers of the Ponte Santa Trinita allowed Allied military vehicles and Florentines to reach the north side of the Arno. The temporary crossing was christened the “Trinity Bridge.”

After the war, Fred Hartt created this map of central Florence that depicts the consequences of the German demolitions on August 4, 1944. Areas in black were obliterated, including the Ponte Santa Trinita (upper left) and large areas north and south of the Ponte Vecchio (center) [Eugene Markowski Collection]

Hartt, and thousands of people who had become refugees in their own city, witnessed horrifying scenes during the initial days of liberation.

In the city there was no water, no light. . . . the mosquitoes came in clouds from the stagnant Arno, the heat was intense and the air suffocating with the odors from the broken sewers and gas mains, the unflushable closets [toilets], and the corpses still buried under the ruins along the Arno. Fascist snipers from windows all over the town picked off civilians at random. During this period nearly four hundred persons, mostly civilians, were killed by the German batteries which continued to shell the town sporadically from Fiesole.

Even after Allied forces gained control of the north side of the Arno, life remained miserable for Florentines. People accessed the north and south sides of the city by walking across the broken remains of the other shattered bridges. Few buildings had intact windowpanes. Stretches of what had once been one of the world’s most cultivated city centers had been replaced with piles of rubble thirty to forty feet high along sections of both sides of the Arno. Women picked through the pieces searching for heirlooms. Men, armed with picks and shovels, hacked away at the remnants of their beaten city to clear paths for workers and begin the process of rebuilding.

Gaunt faces conveyed the hardship endured by the Florentines. Barefoot women, standing shoulder to shoulder, prepared spartan meals on outdoor stoves in the Boboli Gardens. Others hunched over on their knees along the banks of the Arno, using its dirty water to scrub even dirtier clothes on pieces of stone debris created by the blasts. Despite the filth, thousands of people sought relief from the heat and dust by swimming in the muck.

No one indulged in vanity. Young, dark-haired women looked thirty years older, with their once-well-coifed hair standing on end, caked with grayish dust. Men patched and repatched their ragged clothes. A cluster of people usually indicated the location of one of the city’s temporary clean-water supplies. Such oases were fairly easy to find; just follow someone carrying straw-covered wine jugs or gasoline cans in each hand. The children of Florence sat in circles on the ground, devouring meager suppers. It was a desperate moment in the city’s storied history.

In liberated Florence, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn—Mrs. Ernest Hemingway—filed a heartbreaking report.

The botanical gardens are now a graveyard and they are the most frightening place in Florence. The Germans had taken all the hearses; the cemeteries of Florence lie to the north of the city and are in German hands, and there is no wood for coffins. Add to these basic facts the daily normal deaths in a city of three hundred thousand and the daily deaths resulting from mines, mortars, shells and snipers and you have the ghastly problem of Florence. Dead had been left unburied by the Germans, and it was not always possible to retrieve bodies. For instance, one body lay for days on the stumps of Alle Grazie Bridge. No one could reach it, first because of snipers and then because of mines. So trenches are dug in the botanical gardens and the uncasketed bodies are laid in them.

With British Eighth Army now east of the Apennines and advancing on the Gothic Line, Florence and the region of Tuscany fell within the jurisdiction of U.S. Fifth Army. The size of Tuscany and the multitude of its cultural treasures forced the MFAA temporarily to divide responsibilities between Deane Keller (stationed in the western provinces of Pisa, Livorno, and Grosseto) and Fred Hartt (who assumed primary responsibility for the three eastern provinces of Florence, Siena, and Arezzo). Hartt pointed out to Keller that such an arrangement would keep them from “getting constantly in each other’s hair.”

Monuments officers had standing orders to effect temporary repairs, but the moonscape of Florence strained this directive. With the bridges gone and many of the streets impassable, much of the initial work had to be done by hand. There were few workers and even fewer supplies. When army engineers did arrive, they showed little discrimination in what they tore down. Hartt would struggle to explain to them the sturdy structural dynamics of a medieval tower, only to watch wrecking crews ignore the tutorial offered by the second lieutenant art historian.

These confrontations came to a head when Hartt began work to recover the rich library of the Colombaria Society, buried under the rubble of towers and buildings. Hartt believed the library’s manuscripts and documents, which dated from the early Middle Ages, could be located and saved. But his good intentions clashed with the “devouring bulldozer[s]” and their operators, whose orders were to remove rubble as expeditiously as possible and, if need be, shove it into the Arno. The city and its citizens urgently needed water, and the principal water main passed beneath what was once the Colombaria Society.

From Hartt’s perspective, working with the British Royal Engineers was a game of cat and mouse. “[I] made between three and five trips each day, losing about an hour for each trip, to the site of the excavations, and each time whatever British authorities on the spot agreed to stop the bulldozer short of the river in order to allow examination of the rubble heap. Each time [I] left the scene, however, the rubble was pushed in directly without examination.” The Royal Engineers thought quite differently: “Mechanical excavation and carrying away in trucks was tried and found too slow.” In their view, the main problem wasn’t the situation on the ground but the “A.M.G. rep.,” Fred Hartt.

The British lieutenant colonel went on to state: “After many complaints from the A.M.G. rep. none of which were found on investigation to be justified. The Library was then skirted and it was found possible to clear the line of the pipe. . . . This was done. In this work I received the reverse of cooperation from Lieut. Hartt . . . but very good cooperation from some of the Italians.” Despite the procedural difficulties, however, the combined efforts brought water to the Florentines and uncovered “in surprising numbers” the most important archives of the library—its manuscripts and incunabula.
*
The majority of the modern holdings, however, never emerged from the rubble.

In time the engineers and Monuments officers overcame these early mistakes and made real progress. Then a new problem arose. Every damaged building, church, and museum in the center of the city needed roofing tiles. Poggi proposed a resourceful solution: use the terra-cotta tiles from the Medici-era Forte di Belvedere, whose architectural integrity had long since been compromised. Despite the fort’s size, however, the quantity of tiles proved woefully short of the city’s needs. In late September, it began raining, day after day—for thirty-five consecutive days. Hartt lamented that anyone walking through the galleries of the Uffizi would have to “wade up to the ankles during the autumn rains.”

One of the mysteries circulating in Florence after liberation was the whereabouts of American Bernard Berenson, widely considered to be the world’s leading art scholar and connoisseur of early Italian paintings. “B.B.,” as his friends knew him, had lived in Florence since 1900 at his home, Villa I Tatti. With the signing of the armistice in September 1943, and the subsequent occupation of Italy by German troops, Berenson had been urged by his many friends to seek safety and leave the country. Although he initially refused, the Jewish scholar disappeared soon thereafter.

Many of the Monuments officers knew Berenson, some quite well. Monuments Man Captain Cecil Pinsent had been the architect and landscape designer who, “from 1907 to 1951 . . . was the architect of choice for the Anglo-American expatriate community in Florence,” including Berenson. One writer later described his creation at I Tatti as “a princely estate—the villa crowning gracious terraces echoes the splendour of the Villa d’Este—and answered perfectly Bernard Berenson’s imperious character.”

In early 1942, Hermann Göring’s agents made inquiries to Professor Friedrich Kriegbaum and Consul Gerhard Wolf about Berenson’s paintings but later—and incorrectly—dismissed them as being unworthy of the Reichsmarschall’s esteemed collection. Not satisfied that Göring’s agents would stay away, and acting on the advice of Kriegbaum and Giovanni Poggi, Marchesa Serlupi and her staff inventoried Berenson’s paintings and sculpture and, at some personal risk, then hid them. The more valuable pieces were taken to the Serlupi home; lesser works had been walled up in an apartment near the Ponte Santa Trinita and Ponte Vecchio belonging to the sister of Berenson’s secretary, Elisabetta “Nicky” Mariano. When the Gestapo later attempted to locate Berenson, Consul Wolf lied to them and then spread the rumor that the great scholar “had gone to Portugal, via the Vatican.” The guardians of Florence had protected one of their own.

Hartt met Berenson before the war while in Florence doing research. The aspiring art scholar had admired the grand lifestyle enjoyed by Berenson. Hartt considered the aesthetic life in Florence, amid a great art collection and an extraordinary research library, the pinnacle of achievement. And besides, someday, when the war ended, Hartt, like millions of other servicemen, would return home and need to find a job. A person of Berenson’s stature could be very helpful.

On a mid-August day, Hartt and Monuments officer Captain Sheldon Pennoyer had a chance encounter with Professor Giovanni Colacicchi, director of the Accademia delle Belle Arti and a close friend of Berenson’s. Colacicchi wanted to know whether it would be possible to exchange two Nazis “still living in his own house” for the return of Berenson, who was safe but in hiding at the home of Serlupi. Not only had Serlupi and his wife provided shelter and false identification papers for Berenson and Nicky Mariano, they had saved most of his collection. But the area around the Serlupis’ home—Villa delle Fontanelle, located in the neighborhood of Careggi, about three miles north of Florence—was still within German lines; a visit or inspection would have to wait.

On September 1, the first Allied soldier to go in search of Berenson was Captain Alessandro Cagiati, an Italian American intelligence officer of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) and a close friend of Serlupi’s. Hartt arrived the following day and observed with relief that the “Villa [delle Fontanelle] was perforated with at least thirty shell holes of small calibre. . . . Berenson was found in weak and somewhat shocked condition, but quite safe and well.” In fact, Nicky Mariano described just how close Berenson had come to becoming a war casualty. On
Ferragosto,
August 15, during their meager celebration of the Feast of the Assumption, “A shell burst near the convent enclosure and a goodish sized splinter crashed through the dining room window and passed between the heads of B.B. and our hostess and hit the wall behind them.”

Later in the month, the rest of the Monuments officers, including Deane Keller, visited Berenson at his home. Hartt sought refuge there every week he was in Florence. Pennoyer summed it up best: “After all the humanity that one rubs up against in the army to say nothing of the surroundings that go with its day after day grind, the refreshment of stepping into a completely civilized and tastefully furnished home of an American was like a cool beverage after a seemingly unending thirst.”