{"id":4119,"date":"2015-02-08T18:44:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T17:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rickzullo.com\/?p=4119"},"modified":"2021-09-12T15:40:07","modified_gmt":"2021-09-12T13:40:07","slug":"art-angry-river-1966-flood-in-florence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/art-angry-river-1966-flood-in-florence\/","title":{"rendered":"Art and the Angry River: The 1966 Flood in Florence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"the<\/a>
Santa Trinit\u00e0 Bridge and Lungarno Acciauoli
Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Krazcyna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In an effort to inject a healthy dose of genuine culture and learning into this irreverent stump of mine, I\u2019m thrilled to have a guest post today from authors Jane Fortune and Linda Falcone from the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, talking about their book on the 1966 flood in Florence.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, I’d like to\u00a0add\u00a0that…you know what? I\u2019m not going to say anymore. I can only diminish the value of their erudite\u00a0and emotional article. I will, however, give them my sincere\u00a0\u201cGrazie!\u201d Enjoy!<\/p>\n

\u00a0###<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On November 4, 1966, the \u201cSilvery River\u201d, as a folk song calls the Arno, became black with despair. Florentines awoke that morning to find a flood roaring beneath their windowsills. Those on the lower floors immediately appealed to their luckier top-floor neighbors as 400,000 tons of mud and rubble pushed them to abandon their homes. Mud, floating furniture, animal carcasses, heating oil from exploded boilers\u2014Florence was transformed into a mire-filled marshland. The words of Dante\u2019s Purgatory turned suddenly prophetic: the river had become a \u201cdamned accursed ditch\u201d, an open public grave\u2014albeit, more for artwork than for people.<\/p>\n

\"santa<\/a>
Piazza Santa Croce in the flood\u2019s aftermath, photo by Swietlan Nicholas Krazcyna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even today, nearly fifty years later, Florence\u2019s art casualties have not yet been counted with absolute certainty. During the deluge, five panels of Ghiberti\u2019s Doors of Paradise were ripped from the Duomo\u2019s Baptistery and Donatello\u2019s Penitent Magdalene\u2014stained to the knee with oil and ooze\u2014was swept outside the venue, in merciless disgrace. Yet, she was not alone in her plight. An estimated 14,000 works of art were harmed, including Cimabue\u2019s wooden Crucifix\u00a0 which quickly became a world-wide symbol of Florence\u2019s plight. In its home\u2014the Franciscan Basilica of Santa Croce\u2014water levels had reached over 20 feet and two months would pass until the sludge could be removed from its interior. (The entrance of Santa Croce\u2019s Pazzi Chapel is an interesting spot where visitors can view several \u2018flood markers\u2019, or marble plaques indicating water levels during four of the over fifty floods that Florence has experienced since the mid-thirteenth century.)<\/p>\n

\"Flooded<\/a>
Flooded books at Florence\u2019s Central National Library
Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Krazcyna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Florentine art professionals rushed to contain the damage, a \u2018statue hospital\u2019 was set up in Palazzo Davanzati, while the city\u2019s first panel paintings were rushed to dry amid the orange tree\u2019s of the Boboli Garden\u2019s Limonia\u2014an eighteenth-century hothouse for growing the Medici dynasty\u2019s citrus fruits. The temperature-control strategy employed at that makeshift base would, months later, prove detrimental\u2014the first batch of 250 waterlogged paintings literally \u201cshrank\u201d before the eyes of horrified experts. Meanwhile, at the Central National Library skilled restorers were harder to come by\u2014yet a monumental rescue effort was immediately put into place as thousands of students from around the world flocked to the city in an attempt to salvage the three thousand tons of books damaged there. Almost immediately christened \u2018Angeli del Fango\u2019 or \u2018Mud Angels\u2019, these young people formed bucket brigades throughout the city to remove the mud and rubble. Florence\u2019s tireless mayor Piero Bargellini, whose daughter Antonina we interviewed for our book When the World Answered: Florence, Women Artists and the 1966 Flood, remembers her father\u2019s reaction to the onslaught of eager young volunteers\u2014many of whom were not yet eighteen: \u201cWhere am I going to put all these children? my father wondered. He felt like he was responsible for them. In fact, in those days, all of Florence was our family.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mud<\/a>
Mud angels at work
Photo by Swietlan Nicholas Krazcyna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, the Bargellini home at the epicenter of the disaster, kitty-corner to Santa Croce, became a base for providing aid to flood victims. (The flood had ripped off the building\u2019s main door, so his was \u201can open door to Florentines\u201d quite literally!) With regards to hosting \u201cthe children\u201d, Bargellini struck a deal with the Italian Railways and had lodgings set up for a large portion of these 3,000 young guests in sleeper cars. The wise philosopher-mayor understood the situation immediately: there would be no stopping the flood of international support that Florence\u2019s predicament inspired. Though the Italian president was slow to send support, volunteers arrived and funds poured in from all over the world. Florence, the center of Humanism\u2014the center of humanity even\u2014had been wounded, and art lovers everywhere were intent on helping it heal.<\/p>\n

\"Florence\u2019s<\/a>
Florence\u2019s new Twentieth-century Museum
Photo by Francesco Cacchiani<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Within this struggle to save the city\u2019s artistic heritage one art historian, a Pisan professor named Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, had a very different view of how to \u201csave Florence\u201d. The city, Ragghianti thought, needed to concentrate at least part of its efforts on \u201csecuring its future\u201d in both the art industry and tourism. Florence needed to rise up from its ashes like the mythological phoenix and quickly re-assert itself as a leader on the world\u2019s art scene. Could contemporary artists from all over the globe be called upon to donate their works to the city that had lost so much? Could they ban together to create an \u201cUffizi of Modern Art\u201d whose creation would prove Florence\u2019s cultural revival and catapult the city into the twentieth-century? Hundreds of artists, including dozens of women, responded to Ragghianti\u2019s appeal known as \u2018Artisti per Firenze\u2019 or \u201cArtists for Florence\u201d on the promise that their works would one day be exhibited in the city\u2019s first public venue for contemporary art. Though Ragghianti worked toward his dream until his death in 1980, the forward-thinking scholar did not see it reach fulfillment. Only recently, in June 2014, the city of Florence finally inaugurated its\u00a0Museo Novecento in Piazza Santa Maria Novella\u2014in a newly-restored 20-room museum that was originally built as a hospital in the 1300s.<\/p>\n

\"Advancing<\/a>
Advancing Women Artists Foundation restores a work by Titina Maselli
Photo by Francesco Cacchiani<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Visitors can see works by \u201cthe greats\u201d of Italian twentieth-century painting and sculpture including Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi and Renato Guttuso, as well as several works by international women artists, such as Pop artist Titina Maselli, figurative sculptor Antonietta Raphael Mafai and Abstract master Carla Accardi. Works by these last three artists were recently at the center of a conservation project sponsored by the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to discovering, restoring and exhibiting art by women languishing in the Florence museums and storehouses.<\/p>\n

Since the museum\u2019s inauguration, the AWA Foundation has agreed to restore 27 more works by women gifted as a result of the \u201cArtists for Florence\u201d appeal. The restoration will be completed in time for an exhibition commemorating the flood\u2019s fiftieth anniversary in 2016, scheduled at the Museo Novecento. These newly exhibited works represent the flood\u2019s continued legacy\u2014the good that came out of what film director Franco Zeffirelli called \u201cDays of destruction.\u201d It is time for Florence and the world to see this art beneath the museum spotlight and remember the generosity of those who came forward to share in the city\u2019s timeless vocation: to be a center of art for generations to come.<\/p>\n

\"when<\/a>
Book cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For more information about the flood and the women artists who donated their works to the city, check out “When the World Answered: Florence, Women Artists and the 1966 Flood<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The book will soon become the backbone of a documentary produced by PBS for American television! Scheduled to air Stateside in November 2015, the program will be a follow-up to the PBS special inspired by our previous book Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence, which won an Emmy Award in 2013.<\/p>\n

To learn more about the Advancing Women Artists Foundation and its work in Florence, visit our\u00a0Facebook Page<\/a> or our website, Advancing Women Artists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Author Bios<\/h3>\n
\"Jane<\/a>
Jane Fortune and Linda Falcone
Photo by Leo Cardini<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. Jane Fortune is founder and chair of the Advancing Women Artists Foundation and cultural editor of The Florentine, Tuscany\u2019s English-language newspaper. Her books include To Florence, Con Amore: 90 Ways to Love the City and Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence. With Linda Falcone, she co-authored Art by Women in Florence: A Guide through Five Hundred Years and When the World Answered: Florence, Women Artists and the 1966. In the United States, she serves on the Board of Trustees at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and on the National Advisory Board at both the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Indiana University Art Museum. In Florence, she is on the Board of Trustees of the Medici Archive Project, where she has endowed a pilot program dedicated to researching women artists in the age of the Medici.<\/p>\n

Linda Falcone is director of the Advancing Women Artists Foundation in Italy. She is co-author with Jane Fortune of Art by Women in Florence: A Guide through Five Hundred Years. She is also author of two nonfiction books, Italians Dance and I\u2019m a Wallflower and If They Are Roses: The Italian Way with Words, as well as the novel Moving Days. Editor of Santa Croce in Pink: Untold Stories of Women and their Monuments and Chaplin and Costa: Rediscovering Expat Women Painters in Tuscany, she has also co-authored several documentaries on women artists including F\u00e9licie de Fauveau: A French Sculptor in Florence during the Grand Tour. She is also a lecturer and adjunct professor of Italian Culture and Travel Writing for various American university programs abroad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an effort to inject a healthy dose of genuine culture and learning into this irreverent stump of mine, I\u2019m thrilled to have a guest post today from authors Jane Fortune and Linda Falcone from the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, talking about their book on the 1966 flood in Florence. Furthermore, I’d like to\u00a0add\u00a0that…you know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,42,285],"tags":[267,323,321,219,324,322],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}