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When the World Answered. Florence, Women Artists and the 1966 Flood | How to Read Art | The Great Flood of Florence, 1966 | Edge of Taos Desert | One Thousand White Women | The Muralist | The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo | Art Lover | Magnifico
This dramatic, beautifully written account of the flood that ravaged Florence, Italy, in 1966 weaves heartbreaking tales of the disaster and stories of the heroic global efforts to save the cityâs treasures against the historic background of Florenceâs glorious art.
On November 4, 1966, Florence, one of the worldâs most historic cities and the repository of perhaps its greatest art, was struck by a monumental calamity. A low-pressure system had been stalled over Italy for six weeks and on the previous day it had begun to rain again. Nineteen inches fell in twenty-four hours, more than half of the annual total. By two oâclock in the morning twenty-thousand cubic feet of water per second was moving towards Florence. Soon manhole covers in Santa Croce were exploding into the air as jets of water began shooting out of the now overwhelmed sewer system. Cellars, vaults, and strong-rooms were filling with water. Night watchmen on the Ponte Vecchio alerted the bridgeâs jewelers and goldsmiths to come quickly to rescue their wares. By then the water was moving at forty miles per hour at a height of twenty-four feet. At 7:26 a.m. all of Florenceâs electric civic clocks came to a stop. The Piazza Santa Croce was under twenty-two feet of water. Beneath the surface, twelve feet of mud, sewage, debris, and oil sludge were starting to ooze and settle into the cellars and crypts and room after room above them. Six-hundred-thousand tons of it would smother, clot, and encrust the city.Â
Dark Water brings the flood and its aftermath to life through the voices of witnesses past and present. Two young American artists wade heedlessly through the inundated city carrying their baby in order to witness its devastated beauty: the Ponte Vecchio buried in debris and Ghibertiâs panels from the doors of the Florence Baptistery, lying heaped in yard-deep mud; the swamped Uffizi Gallery; and, in the city libraries, one billion pages of Renaissance and antique books, soaked in mire. A Life magazine photographer, stowing away on an army helicopter, arrives to capture a drama that, he felt, âcould only be told by Danteâ amid the flooded tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo in Giotto and Vasariâs Santa Croce. A British student, one of thousands of âmud angelsâ who rushed to Florence to save its art, spends a month scraping mud and mold from Cimabueâs magnificent and neglected Crocifisso as intrigues and infighting among international art experts and connoisseurs swirl around him. And during the fortieth anniversary commemorations of 2006 the author asks himself why art matters so very much to us, and how beauty seems to somehow save the world even in the face of overwhelming disaster.
About: This dramatic, beautifully written account of the flood that ravaged Florence, Italy, in 1966 weaves heartbreaking tales of the disaster and stories of the heroic global efforts to save the cityâs treasures against the historic background of Florenceâs glorious art.
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