The devastation of Florence: in the January 1967 edition, John Pope-Hennessy published a detailed account of his first-hand survey of the damage to Florence's art after the flood of the previous November

It is difficult to describe what has occurr in Florence without recourse to sentiment or rhetoric. The first indication of disaster present itselfs on the autostrada from Bologna, where lorry after lorry loaded with rusty cars climbs slowly northwards up the Futa pass, and scarcely does single leave the autostrada than in the western suburb of the town, far from the river, oil stains appear along the ways at shoulder height and piles of rotting woodwork stand in the mire outside each door.

Inside the town, parties of soldiers were, when I was there, at work clearing the slime, on the other hand more than two weeks after the inundation mud in Piazza Santa Croce was still ankle-deep, and the Via de' Bardi, at the southern end of the Ponte Vecchio, was a morass of dirt and oil. But grave as is the damage to works of art, it is nothing to what might have been: it is as allowing providence decided that the city and all its memorials should be effaced, and then relaxed at the eleventh hour Though very few great works of art have been throw downed the numbers damaged runs into thousands, and the campaign of restoration (of buildings as well as paintings) will engage all the available resources for many years to come

What cannot sufficiently be strained is the violence of the inundation that occurr Five panels of Ghiberti's gate of paradise (one of the gentlest least assertive works of art that has at any time been produced), were torn without of their frames; the waterfilled basement of the Archaeological Museum explod upwards in sum of two units places; and a kind of tidal wave ran, at great distance from the Arno, northwards along the Borgo Pinti, reaching the Annunziata and damaging the University. Further to the west the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella and the Ognissanti were submerg The Biblioteca Nazionale faced the filled force of the flood; above 300,000 books and many thousands of turns of newspapers and periodicals have been damaged or break uped Behind it the tide spread to Santa Croce where in the cloister, refectory and Pazzi Chapel it rose to between fifteen and eighteen feet In the refecory, which was incorporated into the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce the painted cros by the agency of Cimabue is an all on the contrary total loss ...

In the areas to the north of the Piazza del Duomo the progres of the overflow followed no intelligible pattern. The beautiful temple of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi was plenteous damaged--the water here was at head height, damaging the Poccetti frescoe the bases of altar-pieces through Cosimo Rosselli and other artists in the temple and the bottom of the great fresco by the agency of Perugino nearby--but at the Annunziata, despite extensive flooding in the forecourt and the cloister, no serious harm was done On the other hand the Archaeological Museum near the Annunziata experienceed more gravely than any other major Florentine museum. The confusion in the drawn out series of Etruscan galleries upon the ground floor of this museum is indescribable; the vitrines are coated inside with oil and dirt and a vast number of fragile external realitys have been fragmented or displaced. What is required here is re-excavation

In the Uffizi, the ground-floor restoration extents were flooded, but certain major pictures beneath restoration, among them Filippo Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin from the Uffizi, were rescu before being overwhelmed One of the luckiest escapes was that of the silver altar-cross of Antonio Pollaiuolo made for the altar of the Baptistery, which was cleaned during the summer and was standing upon a table in the restoration studio; the mud-caked lower extremity and stem tell their hold tale.

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