Dark Water_ Flood And Redemption In The City Of Masterpieces Part 5

In the Palazzo Vecchio the mayor of Florence, Piero Bargellini, was to be the guest of honor at the American Chamber of Commerce banquet. Bargellini was late, preoccupied with the survival of his center-left administration, which was due to face a vote of noconfidence the following week. After his arrival they entertained him with a doc.u.mentary on the Mississippi River, its beauties, perils, and spectacular floods. In his remarks at the end of the evening he joked, "Don't imagine I was fazed by your movie. Florence has never been afraid of compet.i.tion: if it keeps raining like this, tomorrow morning the Arno will beat your Mississippi."

It was a jest, although Bargellini was a serious man, bookish and devoutly Catholic, for whom politics was the exercise of humanism and charity. He went home to the family palazzo in Santa Croce that night to his books and his prayers, knowing no more than anyone else. There was, as yet, no knowledge-never mind an alarm-to be aware of, to take hold of and take action upon. Upriver, of course, the flood was already a fact, but as the water reached a village it also cut the telephone lines. The river was covering its own tracks, for all its noise and roiling flotsam, proceeding by stealth.

Nonetheless, by eleven o'clock the fire department in Florence had received calls complaining of flooded cellars and garages. But a damp bas.e.m.e.nt was scarcely an emergency. At the Brigata Friuli barracks near Santa Croce, a soldier went outside for a cigarette and returned to say that the sewers weren't working properly. But he was from Naples, and what could somebody from Naples know about the public works facilities of a great city like Florence?

Romildo Cesaroni worked as a night watchman for the syndicate of jewelers that had shops on the Ponte Vecchio. As was his custom, he made his patrols back and forth across the bridge on his bicycle, taking breaks at either end. But around one o'clock he dismounted midway across. The noise was tremendous-it was raining hard with what felt like a gale-force wind-but what struck him as he stood for a while on the pavement was a palpable vibration emanating from the stones, from, it seemed, the arches of the bridge itself, a vibration on the verge of becoming a throb. He went back to the phone at the far end and began calling his employers one by one. He was from northern Italy, born in a valley called Vajont. They'd better come quick and collect their gold.

A few other communications did get through. Bruno Santi, an art history student living in San Niccolo on the Oltrarno side of Florence, was asleep when his father got a call from his brother-in-law, Bruno's uncle. The uncle's village ten miles east of Florence was about to go underwater. Bruno's father got in the family car and began to drive upriver. When he got to the first bridge he needed to cross to reach the village, he saw water lapping the roadway, skimming across the bridge deck. Even if he got across, he'd be unlikely to get back. There was nothing he could do for his brother-in-law. He drove back to San Niccolo to secure his workshop and get his family to high ground. He woke Bruno, who was due to take his final graduate exam on quattrocento panel painting the day after next. That would have to wait.

Later, around three A.M. A.M., a journalist working the night desk at Florence's leading newspaper, La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione, got a call from a shift worker, Carlo Maggiorelli, upriver at the Anconella pumping station of the Florence aqueduct. Everything was underwater. He'd shut down the pumps, not that that mattered. The journalist urged him to flee. "I can't abandon the plant. It's my shift." Besides, he had a sandwich to eat. He had a thermos of coffee. He had ten cigarettes. He would manage. Two days later they found his body embedded in mud inside a hydraulic tunnel. Carlo Maggiorelli was reckoned to be the first fatality of November 4, 1966.

On Monte Falterona, the snow on Dante's spring had washed away. At nine o'clock an inch of rain was falling every sixty minutes. Snowmelt and downpour were ma.s.sing in the riverbed, and in about nine hours 120,000 cubic feet of water per second would begin reaching Florence.

At three in the morning Nick Kraczyna was just finishing. He painted every night while Amy and Anatol slept. He and Amy had gotten married in the spring of 1963, the first year of his master's degree program, and left for Italy the following year, crossing the Atlantic on a Yugoslavian freighter. Amy had been seven months pregnant.

That was two years ago. Now their son, Anatol, was eighteen months old and everything had gone more or less as Nick had envisioned: they were living a block from Santo Spirito, he was painting Icarus, they were happy, and they were poor. The apartment had no bathroom and no hot water, and for heat they used scaldini scaldini, the traditional Tuscan pots that held hot coals obtained from the wood and charcoal merchant. You cradled it in your lap, set it under the table by your feet when you ate, and put it in your bed for a while before you went to sleep.

That night it was 50 degrees outside, not terribly cold, although the stones of their palazzo a half block from the Arno held the cold far past dawn and, in weather like this, nearly sweated with damp. Before he went to join Amy and Anatol in the bed, Nick went to the window on the terrace. He could see the more substantial palazzi on the other side of the river illuminated by spotlights. At the edges of the light, he could just make out the water. It was high and moving at tremendous speed, like gray clouds stampeding before a strong wind. He could hear the river, or rather, the friction of the river on its banks, the parapets of the Lungarni and piers of the bridges, the Arno grinding against the city.

It was something to see, or because the light was so poor and the atmosphere so murky, to imagine; to seize the blanks in the picture and fill them, extrapolate the contents of what was now invisible; launch a winged visionary out the window to explore the hidden interior of the maelstrom. Nick went to bed, the rumble and pulse in his ears.

The first dead inside Florence were seventy thoroughbred horses. The Mugnone, a tributary of the Arno, cuts down through the hills northeast of the city and then, by means of a chain of man-made ca.n.a.ls, swings west around the perimeter of the city to join the main river by the low-lying Cascine city park, a recreation complex that contained tennis courts, soccer fields, a small zoo, and a racetrack. The horses, locked in their stables, drowned, thrashing and screaming, as though impazziti impazziti, driven mad. A custodian heard them in the distance at one-thirty in the morning.

At three o'clock, the city was asleep. Except along the riverfront, there was no sound but the patter of rain on rooftops. The waters of the flood, however, were running not just through the city in the channel of the Arno, but under it through sewers and storm drains. In most neighborhoods the flood first appeared not through breaches in the riverbank, but oozing up from manholes and drains. As the night went on, pressure within the system lifted and floated off manhole covers. Later, they would rocket into the sky, propelled on jets of floodwater.

In most of Florence information, like the water, only seeped into the city. There were no alarms, sirens, or radio and television bulletins. Only at the river, by the trembling Ponte Vecchio, was there unmistakably a flood, and soon you would not even be able to say how big it was. At three o'clock in the morning the city's flood gauge on the Lungarno Acciaiuoli between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinita recorded 8.69 meters-twenty-eight-and-a-half feet-and was then ripped away by the water and carried off down the Arno.

As often happened in Florence, what you got depended on who you were and whom you knew. The jewelers of the Ponte Vecchio had been informed, as, by sheer luck, had Bruno Santi's father. Mayor Bargellini had been awakened and returned to his office around two o'clock, just before the water in his Santa Croce neighborhood got too deep for anyone to leave. He would not see his home for many days to come.

In Rome, the telephone of the Florence-born director Franco Zeffirelli rang near dawn. It was his sister who lived on Via dell'Oriuolo east of the Duomo: there was water in her street toward the Santa Croce end and, she suspected, still more near the church itself. At 3:48 A.M. A.M. there had finally been a radio news bulletin referring to the flooding upstream, but nothing about Florence itself. there had finally been a radio news bulletin referring to the flooding upstream, but nothing about Florence itself.

But Zeffirelli's sister was emphatic about what was taking place below her window and, once he seized on an idea, Zeffirelli was himself a force to be reckoned with. He phoned the president of RAI, the Italian state broadcasting network, and asked for a film crew and a helicopter. Shortly after dawn, Zeffirelli was filming in Florence, long before any other news agency (including RAI's own) was on the story.

Around five o'clock the Arno finally burst its banks within the city walls: water from still small breaches in the Lungarni met water coming up from the drains and flooded Via dei Bardi and Borgo San Jacopo on the Oltrarno as well as Corso dei Tintori between Santa Croce and the Biblioteca n.a.z.ionale on the north bank. At 6:30 A.M. A.M. the Franciscan priest Gustavo Cocci left his cloister at Santa Croce to say a seven o'clock ma.s.s at a neighborhood church. It was dawn, and he was the first person to pa.s.s through the gates of the basilica into the outside world that day. He opened the the Franciscan priest Gustavo Cocci left his cloister at Santa Croce to say a seven o'clock ma.s.s at a neighborhood church. It was dawn, and he was the first person to pa.s.s through the gates of the basilica into the outside world that day. He opened the portone portone, the great door, and saw the piazza, the water moving upward on a gentle swell, a Galilee he might walk across holding his robe just above his waist.

All at once, at seven in the morning, there was news. Trapped in his second-floor studio, an announcer for RAI radio in Florence lowered a microphone out the window toward the torrent running down the street: "What you're hearing," he said, "is Florence between the Duomo and Santa Maria Novella station."

Even more extraordinarily, La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione managed to produce a morning edition headlined managed to produce a morning edition headlined L'Arno Straripa a Firenze L'Arno Straripa a Firenze, "The Arno overflows at Florence." The last item had gone in at 6:10. The typesetting room was underwater a half hour later, the pressroom a little after the print run was finished at seven.

By then most of the quarters of Florence and its suburbs that were not already underwater were cut off from the rest of the world. The autostrada autostrada and other highways in and out of the city were inundated, bridges and causeways washed out, and most railways severed. The Santa Maria Novella station, well above street level, continued to function, even if its trains had no destinations to reach. Telephone lines had been cut for some time and gas lines shut down. The pumps that drove the city's water supply had been switched off in the middle of the night by Carlo Maggiorelli before he'd drowned in mud. Trucks and automobiles couldn't be driven or else stalled out as they took on water. And soon enough car after car began to float away. The city, except for the water and the things that floated upon it, was motionless. and other highways in and out of the city were inundated, bridges and causeways washed out, and most railways severed. The Santa Maria Novella station, well above street level, continued to function, even if its trains had no destinations to reach. Telephone lines had been cut for some time and gas lines shut down. The pumps that drove the city's water supply had been switched off in the middle of the night by Carlo Maggiorelli before he'd drowned in mud. Trucks and automobiles couldn't be driven or else stalled out as they took on water. And soon enough car after car began to float away. The city, except for the water and the things that floated upon it, was motionless.

Not only movement in s.p.a.ce but, it seemed, time halted: At 7:29, with the last electricity cut off, hundreds of clocks stopped all over the city. That instant corresponded with what was later calculated as the moment of the flood's maximum violence and force. On the faces of Florence's clocks, it would remain 7:29 for many days. If time did not actually stop, neither did it seem to move forward into days that were like those before November 4, 1966. Perhaps, like the water, time receded, rolled backward into oblivion, Florence's great sea.

It was not long after dawn when Nick was awakened. A neighbor was calling up the stairs: they should collect as much water as they could, in pans and empty scaldini scaldini and jugs. The pressure was giving out. In a minute the taps would dry up. There wouldn't be any water at all. and jugs. The pressure was giving out. In a minute the taps would dry up. There wouldn't be any water at all.

That was absurd. They had nothing but water, had had it for weeks, but Nick understood a moment later: the lights cut out. They were going to be roughing it, at least for today.

While Amy filled the last few pots they possessed, Nick tried to get a better sense of what was happening. He clambered across the roof to the terrace of Pensione Bartolini and descended the stairs to its entrance on the Lungarno Guicciardini. To see the edge of their side of the river from here, Nick would normally have to walk over to the parapet and look down twenty feet below him. But today the surface of the Arno was level with the top of the parapet, four feet above the street: the river channel was now higher than the level of the city, an elevated aqueduct whose sides were formed by the Lungarni.

Nick had brought his camera. He had sensed this was history. The water was splashing over the top of the parapet, and he started taking pictures. This, he was certain, was the crest of the flood, as high as the water would go, and he was capturing the definitive moment. He went back upstairs to help Amy.

Ugo Procacci was at the Uffizi by dawn. The night watchman had called him and now there were a dozen people to clear the whole ground floor of the museum of any artworks in harm's way, which, it had to be presumed, meant all of them. Umberto Baldini had been called by Procacci about the time the clocks stopped and arrived soaked to the skin. He'd come in by way of Via della Ninna, which sloped down from the Piazza della Signoria to a level below that of the Lungarno at the front of the museum. The water there had been chest high. Within an hour the Lungarno would be breached, and the Arno would rush into the declivity, driving a forty-foot-long oak before it, which lodged like a battering ram behind the museum.

Luisa Becherucci was the director of the gallery, but it was Baldini who worked at Procacci's side. He was neither precisely Procacci's apprentice nor his right-hand man, but-despite his subordinate rank in the Superintendency-almost an extension of him, a co-Procacci, a free agent who still gave the formal appearance of being a junior partner. As an art historian and manager of the Gabinetto (now, as fitted its larger status, known as the Laboratorio), Baldini was perhaps less strictly brilliant than brilliantly competent, with a preternatural gift for detecting consensus and then shaping it to his own aspirations. He was not a genius, but slogging through Vasari's Uffizi that morning, he was in his element.

It would have been impossible to save the collection-the Uffizi housed more than 110,000 works of art-but for the fact that the actual galleries were almost all on the second and third floors, and these, as well as the vast portrait gallery housed in Vasari's Corridoio over the Ponte Vecchio, were high above the river. But that still left a large number of works on the ground floor and still more either undergoing or awaiting restoration in Baldini's lab across the court, among them pieces by Giotto, Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Vasari himself. Some were easily portable-two saints by Simone Martini from Bernard Berenson's personal collection-but others were in perilously fragile condition (a detached fres...o...b.. Giotto) or, in the case of Botticelli's Incoron.a.z.ione Incoron.a.z.ione, too large to move without disa.s.sembling their panels. In total, there were about two hundred paintings to be relocated, and twelve people to do it before the Arno crested and surged inside.

Nick thought he had caught the river at its apogee, although by the time he got back upstairs, the water was slopping over the parapet and down his street. But the ground to the east toward the Ponte Santa Trinita was still dry, and he gathered Amy and Anatol and brought them downstairs. They needed to see this stupendous thing-epic, biblical, apocalyptic-not from the window or the rooftop, but from dead center, from inside. He led them out onto the Ponte Santa Trinita, Amy carrying Anatol, to the midway point. He noticed his neighbor Antonio Raffo's Fiat, parked there, incongruous and alone.

The water was still several feet below the apex of the center arch where they stood, and as it emerged from beneath the bridge, it seemed to fall away, breaking into rapids, cascades, and cataracts, surging back against itself, forming chasms and whirlpools steep as thunderheads. The bridge-only fully rebuilt eight years previously-vibrated beneath them and Nick took pictures. Upstream, the Ponte Vecchio sat almost stolidly, like a dam, the water lapping the tops of the arches. In the opposite direction, to the west, the water seemed to spread and flatten before it reached the Ponte alla Carraia, and slid under the bridge with perhaps two feet to spare. Beyond that Nick and Amy could make out the shadow of the third downstream span, the Ponte Vespucci, disappearing under the Arno.

They'd been alone until now, but then they saw a man with a camera approach the bridge, walk out to mid-span, and begin taking pictures. "Look at him," Amy said, holding Anatol as the torrent seethed by. She was four months pregnant with another baby. "He's crazy to be out here."

That must have meant they were crazy too. But they were not afraid, and Nick least of all. He was twenty-five years old and felt nearly immortal. As for the bridge quivering beneath them, it might have been a roller coaster or a surfboard he was riding. Suspended above the river, the entire world racing away beneath him, he could have been hovering over the earth as it surged by, being made and unmade in one motion. Wasn't it incredible-like watching a galaxy being born or coming apart; wasn't it really the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen?

By eleven o'clock, it seemed to almost everyone that the Ponte Vecchio was going to collapse. The water was still rising, and in addition to its own force and pressure-thousands of tons moving at perhaps forty miles an hour-was throwing enormous quant.i.ties of debris against the face of the span. Whole trees, forty and fifty feet long, had shot through the shops on one side of the bridge and out the other, lodged like spears. On the second story in the Corridoio Vasariano, the floor shuddered and gla.s.s trilled in the window frames.

It was there that Ugo Procacci decided he needed to go, alone. The portraits in the Corridoio needed to come out, and because he could not in good conscience place his staff in danger, the paintings would be taken out one at a time, each carried by him and only him. That was an official instruction, an order. He ran off down the Corridoio, scarcely able to keep his footing as he reached mid-span. By then Baldini, the first to disobey, was coming up behind him, and then the ten others. They formed a human chain, handing back portrait after portrait as the bridge shook below them, as trees and, now, a floating car and then a truck thundered into it.

When the job was done, all of them were trembling. Some wept while others were overcome by nausea. They needed something to eat, something to drink, said Procacci. They pulled themselves together once more and broke down the door of the museum snack bar.

Father Cocci hadn't gotten to his ma.s.s that morning. He retreated inside the cloister of Santa Croce with his brother monks, or rather into the upper story of the cloister: by eight o'clock the ground floor was underwater. In fact, all around the Basilica-from Vasari's house to the south to Borgo Allegri to the north-the water was higher than it had ever been before, even in 1333, and it would go higher still.

To the west, the former Murate convent-the one-time home of Vasari's Last Supper Last Supper before the painting and the nuns had been dispossessed by Napoleon-was half submerged. At dawn there had been men huddled on the roof, but by mid-morning most of them had clambered onto large pieces of floating debris or simply swum away. They were men of the most adaptable sort, accustomed to surviving by their wits. After Napoleon, the Murate convent had been converted into the Florence city jail. It still was. In the early morning hours, the guards realized that if the convicts remained in their ground-floor cells they were going to drown. After turning the locks, they abandoned the jail and left the eighty-three prisoners to fend for themselves. Some disappeared, their old ident.i.ties and histories carried off by the flood; others were said to have performed heroic rescues and pitched in at soup kitchens and first-aid posts before giving themselves up. One, found clinging to the top of a traffic signal surrounded by twelve feet of water, was pulled to an upstairs window by neighbors using a rope of knotted sheets. They dried him off, put him in a warm bed, and fed him before the painting and the nuns had been dispossessed by Napoleon-was half submerged. At dawn there had been men huddled on the roof, but by mid-morning most of them had clambered onto large pieces of floating debris or simply swum away. They were men of the most adaptable sort, accustomed to surviving by their wits. After Napoleon, the Murate convent had been converted into the Florence city jail. It still was. In the early morning hours, the guards realized that if the convicts remained in their ground-floor cells they were going to drown. After turning the locks, they abandoned the jail and left the eighty-three prisoners to fend for themselves. Some disappeared, their old ident.i.ties and histories carried off by the flood; others were said to have performed heroic rescues and pitched in at soup kitchens and first-aid posts before giving themselves up. One, found clinging to the top of a traffic signal surrounded by twelve feet of water, was pulled to an upstairs window by neighbors using a rope of knotted sheets. They dried him off, put him in a warm bed, and fed him ribollita ribollita, only realizing who their guest had been some days later when the police came by.

By ten o'clock, the BBC World Service in London had broadcast the first international news of the flood and a few hours later the American television networks would report it on their morning bulletins. In Rome, the nation's capital, apparently no one knew anything: neither President Saragat nor Prime Minister Moro had any comment. RAI was broadcasting cartoons. But by noon Mayor Bargellini had made his way to a radio microphone and announced-to whoever might have been able to listen-"The water has arrived in the Piazza del Duomo. In some neighborhoods it has reached the second floor. I ask everyone to remain calm." There'd been an explosion, a real thunderclap, of a gasoline storage tank near Piazza Beccaria that had terrified half the city, but caused only one fatality. Bargellini added, "Those of you who have boats, canoes, and skiffs, bring them to the Palazzo Vecchio."

On the other side of the river, in San Niccolo, Bruno Santi and his father had managed to move their family up the hill to a relative's house. But their attempt to remove chemicals and corrosives from the bas.e.m.e.nt of his father's studio had failed: the water was up to the threshold of the first floor. The cellars and bas.e.m.e.nts of Florence were full of such things, most innocuously wine and olive oil, but also-more than any other substance-heating oil. The tanks were full for the long winter ahead. All this was beginning to seep upward, into the floodwater.

Still farther up the hill, twelve-year-old Barbara Minniti from Rome was visiting "Zio Nello," her uncle Emanuele Casama.s.sima, director of the Biblioteca n.a.z.ionale, for the holiday weekend. A little after breakfast, the telephone had rung and Barbara's uncle answered it. He stood in the hallway, stock-still, listening, striking the side of his head with the palm of his right hand. Then, in a great hurry, he left the house.

At noon Barbara and her cousins went to the Piazzale Michelangelo, which overlooked the city from the south. There were a lot of people gathered there, staring, holding black umbrellas, silent in the rain. Below you could see the towers, the rooftops, and the Duomo looming above them like a volcanic island. And between them and where Barbara stood was a valley full of water where the river had once been, a distended stomach expanding from the gullet of the Arno upstream. A little to the east, toward Piazza Beccaria, a plume rose into the air, maybe another volcano, this one spuming smoke or black steam.

Almost straight across, just in front of Santa Croce at the place where the riverbank used to be, Barbara could see Zio Nello's enormous bibliotecca bibliotecca, the Italian equivalent of the Library of Congress. It might have been floating, marooned in this new sea, but tethered at the back to Santa Croce, which depending on how you looked at it, was either an island or the deepest point in the ocean.

Either way, there was no chance that Uncle Emanuele was going there today. Even a ship, a big one, would get sucked downstream and crash into the Ponte Vecchio. After Barbara and her cousins got home, her uncle came back, wet and shaking. Sometimes you couldn't say if Zio Nello was being silly or serious. "Now comes the looting, the cholera, the famine," he had told Barbara's mother.

Giovanni Menduni had just turned thirteen years old and he and his mother were going out to buy a chicken. But his mother still treated him like he was twelve, a bambino bambino instead of a instead of a ragazzo. ragazzo. They walked down the Via degli Artisti, which led from the Piazza Giorgio Vasari to the Piazzale Donatello. People were saying They walked down the Via degli Artisti, which led from the Piazza Giorgio Vasari to the Piazzale Donatello. People were saying L'Arno e andato fuori di testa L'Arno e andato fuori di testa, a phrase that didn't quite make sense to Giovanni. A person could andare di fuori di testa- andare di fuori di testa-"have gone out of his mind"-but could the Arno? Then, when they got as far as Piazzale Donatello and saw the water, his mother made him go home.

Here he was at an epochal moment in history-or at least the start of an adventure-and he was missing it. Meanwhile his eighteen-year-old brother was in the thick of it, coming home in his muddy boots with tales of rescues and close calls and devastation. But for the next week, his mother kept him in. It was frustration piled on top of frustration. Just ten days before the flood he'd finally talked her into looking at a Hammond B-3 electric organ, which he coveted more than any other object in the world, the gold standard in jazz and pop keyboards. It wasn't just his heart's desire but the single thing upon which the outcome of his whole life was contingent.

The music store was just off the Piazza Duomo, and Giovanni waited outside while his mother went in. After perhaps two minutes she came out looking not simply unpersuaded but shocked, even stunned. It wasn't just that the B-3 was too expensive, but that the whole world it represented was beyond the pale: she'd seen the kind of people who hung around the store-the kind of people who played the B-3-and they were seedy, shiftless jazz and rock types of the worst sort, neither good company nor examples for a twelve-all right, thirteen-year-old. The only way he'd ever get a B-3 would be if someone just gave it to him, or if he waited forever, until he was old.

So that had been that and now there was this. He might as well just give up.

Nick and Amy needed food and Anatol needed milk. It was Nick's job to shop every morning before lunch-they had no refrigerator-and around eleven he went out to see what he could find. The clearest way forward seemed to be across the Ponte Santa Trinita, where Antonio's car still sat perfectly undisturbed, a pert jalopy atop a Renaissance architectural masterpiece with a deluge running under it.

On the opposite side Nick turned left and walked west along the Lungarno Corsini. But then he began to worry-even finally realized the likelihood-that the bridge would be washed away and that he would be stranded on the other bank of the river, cut off from Amy and Anatol. So at the next bridge downstream, the Ponte alla Carraia, he crossed back over to the Oltrarno side. At the Borgo San Frediano he turned west again, toward the Carmine church and the Porta San Frediano. He slogged on, block after block, the water at best shin-deep in some places but up to his waist in others. Perhaps a mile from his apartment, he was able to buy some canned goods from a grocer who was hurriedly moving his stocks up to his second-floor apartment.

Going home, Nick found himself walking against the current in what was now almost entirely waist-deep water. To move forward without falling he had to brace himself against buildings with both hands, so he put all the cans into his pockets or stuck them inside his jacket. Looking toward the river, he realized that the elevation of the Lungarno was actually higher than the streets immediately behind it, which sloped up toward the artificially raised banks created by Giuseppe Poggi a century earlier.

Having moved up to the Lungarno, and pushing eastward again, Nick was able to wade down the middle of the roadway to avoid being immersed by the water that was slopping and, increasingly, surging over the parapet. But between the Ponte alla Carraia and his apartment, the street had been torn up for repairs. That meant Nick would either have to turn back down to the parallel Via Santo Spirito, which he knew was already inundated, or work his way directly along the side of the parapet.

He chose the shorter if more reckless course, rather than the deeper, more tedious, but safer slog down the Via Santo Spirito. On the Lungarno he was a tightrope walker, clinging to the parapet edge. He was being thrown off balance by the force of the water pouring over the wall, and, as the water level in the Lungarno drew even with the river, equally at risk of being sucked into the torrent and carried away downstream. The food in his pockets and inside his jacket had already long disappeared, and his clothes and shoes had become dead weights that threatened to pull him in and under. But he inched his way along the parapet, his fingers white and swollen.

Later, Nick could not quite say exactly when he realized he might be going to die-maybe time really had stopped, flowing flowing but not pa.s.sing-or if he realized it for more than an instant before the feeling pa.s.sed. Because as he forced his way upriver, with the whole Arno pressing down on him, what he felt most of all was joy, sheer exhilaration. When he reached his apartment he went out on the roof and saw that the entire parapet that had been his lifeline had been washed away. but not pa.s.sing-or if he realized it for more than an instant before the feeling pa.s.sed. Because as he forced his way upriver, with the whole Arno pressing down on him, what he felt most of all was joy, sheer exhilaration. When he reached his apartment he went out on the roof and saw that the entire parapet that had been his lifeline had been washed away.

At one o'clock, the Ponte Vecchio was still intact, thanks in part to a truck that had smashed through both sides of the center of the bridge, easing some of the pressure of the flood against the superstructure by allowing water to pa.s.s freely over the deck. But the river was continuing to rise-it would do so for the next five hours-and with each cubic meter of water came a still larger amount of debris and, increasingly, mud.

Inside the Uffizi, Procacci and his staff had been joined by Maria Luisa Bonelli, director of the adjacent Museum of the History of Science. Trapped in her apartment on the top floor of the museum, she'd escaped across the rooftops to the Uffizi carrying Galileo's telescope. They and, as the day went on, others would move artworks until five o'clock the next morning. At around mid-afternoon Procacci's old art historian friend Carlo Ragghianti turned up. They embraced and Procacci said, "It's like August of forty-four, remember?" They cried for a few moments and went back to work.

By now other parts of Florence's artistic and civic patrimony more distant from the Arno had been struck. To the west, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, water was washing up against the bottom of Masaccio's Trinita. Trinita. In the cloister Uccello's In the cloister Uccello's Flood and Drunkeness of Noah Flood and Drunkeness of Noah was now truly inundated. was now truly inundated.

Closer to the Uffizi, the state archives were awash, as was the Palazzo dei Tribunali, the city courts. Transcripts, briefs, and writs drifted through the courtrooms. In the bas.e.m.e.nt, t.i.tles, deeds, and contracts swelled, sank, or floated along the ceiling. Facts and promises-vital to some, best forgotten to others-disappeared.

In the afternoon Florentines began to rendersi conto- rendersi conto-literally "to render or take an account" but in common parlance "to realize"-that they had been struck by more than an inconvenience. "The Arno sure loves Florence," said someone in the Oltrarno, and a graffito appeared on the door of a trattoria: "No roast chicken today-only boiled."

Another artist and writer in Nick's neighborhood, writing in his journal, wondered how people would deal with what was happening. He was not optimistic: "Florentines are too old, too bitter, too gray inside and out, to believe in the existence of a flood like this." Nor, he thought, would they believe that anyone would want to help them.

In the salone salone of a residential hotel near the Ponte Vespucci, a wizened octogenarian woman-a countess from a forgotten aristocratic line-complained when the electricity went out, "What has happened to the lights? It's very dim in here without lights. And all these persons are talking extraordinarily loudly. It's not necessary to talk so loud, is it?" of a residential hotel near the Ponte Vespucci, a wizened octogenarian woman-a countess from a forgotten aristocratic line-complained when the electricity went out, "What has happened to the lights? It's very dim in here without lights. And all these persons are talking extraordinarily loudly. It's not necessary to talk so loud, is it?"

She would not be persuaded that the dark and the hubbub were the result of a flood. She didn't believe in floods, and she'd lived in Florence all her life, ever since she was a debutante. She finally allowed herself to be taken to the window overlooking the Arno. "But why don't they stop it?" she said. "What is anybody doing about it?"

Some things could not be explained to anyone, or not to some people. The water was crawling toward the San Salvi psychiatric hospital and the patients would not be rea.s.sured or calmed. Most of them already lived in one or another h.e.l.l. They screamed and beat the walls like the horses in the Cascine stables.

Below the city, where the plain of the valley broadened, the Arno too was expanding, if not slowing. The garden where Marina Ripari played was submerged in an instant. Her father reached her, grasped her for an instant, but then the water tore her out of his hands. Being three years old, she would at least know nothing of h.e.l.l, or of the great sea to which the Arno was carrying her body.

No one heard anything from Santa Croce. The water had covered the steps of the basilica some hours ago and was now making its way into the church. The statue of Dante stood like an iceberg in the piazza. Pigeons with no place else to land settled onto the cap shielding his hook-nosed face. Around him, for blocks and blocks, people remained on the second or third floors of their buildings, trapped, waiting for the water to subside. Just now, at three o'clock, it was ten and a half feet deep. But it only rose. Save for the dead, the inhabitants of the Santa Croce district would suffer more than anyone in Florence.

People were poor in Santa Croce. They had St. Francis, but most didn't have telephones or appliances, nor did they hold much interest for the larger world or even the rest of the city. So the water stole in among them even more unnoticed than elsewhere.

For example, Delia Quercioli had a narrow escape on the Piazza dei Ciompi. "I was sleeping and was sleeping well. I'm deaf. My cat was already dead. They broke down the door to save me." Vanna Caldelli lived right on Piazza Santa Croce and from her window she watched tables, chairs, doors, and ma.n.u.scripts from the cloister and the Biblioteca n.a.z.ionale drift by. Later came the heating oil, a stream within the stream of floodwater, the smell so strong you couldn't breathe. "I said to myself, 'Maybe this is the Last Judgment.' "

Azelide Benedetti lived in a ground-floor apartment behind the basilica, in line with the high altar where Cimabue's Crucifix Crucifix had once hung and Vasari's had once hung and Vasari's ciborio ciborio had sat. She was sixty-six years old and pushed herself around the apartment in a wheelchair. At first, the water began to drip in, but then to dribble and flow. She rolled to her window-grilled to keep thieves away-and began to call out. The nuns from the convent next door heard her and by the time they came back with Father Boretti from the parish church of San Giuseppe the water had nearly reached the bottom of Azelide's window. Soon it would be running over the sill. had sat. She was sixty-six years old and pushed herself around the apartment in a wheelchair. At first, the water began to drip in, but then to dribble and flow. She rolled to her window-grilled to keep thieves away-and began to call out. The nuns from the convent next door heard her and by the time they came back with Father Boretti from the parish church of San Giuseppe the water had nearly reached the bottom of Azelide's window. Soon it would be running over the sill.

Supplemented by the subterranean water that had already crept into the apartment under the bolted door, the cascade through the window quickly began filling Azelide's front room. The water was finding its own level. Inside, lighter objects-pillows, bottles, pots, cups, wooden Madonnas and saints-became buoyant, and then the furniture began to shift, to bob and lift free, and circulate around the room. It pressed around Azelide and then drifted back toward the door to the hall and the street. The door, of a piece with the grill, was barred from inside, and by the time Father Boretti returned with more men to try and break it down, it was blocked on the inside by a tangle of furniture.

The thing to do, the priest realized, was to get Azelide up as high as possible; the water couldn't rise indefinitely, and then it would recede. He pa.s.sed her a sheet through the window and told her to thread it through the spokes of the wheelchair and the uppermost bar of the grille. Then, pulling up the sheet and lashing it to the grille, they were able to raise Azelide in her chair almost to the top of her window. She was well above the priest, the nuns, and the men outside, but they were already nearly up to their heads. Soon the water would be rubbing, catlike, against Azelide's numb legs.

There was nothing to do but pray that it would stop. After an hour only Azelide and the priest still remained. He couldn't hold her hand, raised up as she was, and she had a rosary in it, which she clutched, worrying the beads as the water worked its way upward. She must have made her confession-Azelide was very pious-but that was not something Father Boretti could speak of. Around noon, she did say, with her face pressed against the bars of the grille, just before he had to leave-the water was nearly over his head, closing the last of the cranny between them-"I'm crying." Or rather she whispered it, as though it might put her soul in danger.

By six o'clock that evening the water was receding, although it would be several more hours before people were sure of this. The Arno had crested around noon, flowing at a speed of 145,000 cubic feet per second with 2.5 billion cubic feet of water pa.s.sing under the Ponte Vecchio. For the next six hours, it continued to run at a slower 106,000 cubic feet per second. But the maximum capacity of the river was 77,000 cubic feet per second, which meant that there were 30,000 cubic feet-225,000 gallons-of water entering Florence every second with no place to go except into the city. By midnight, finally, the Arno was able to carry as much water downstream as it contained upstream.

The sun had gone down a little after five, but no lights went on in the evening, there being no electricity. Not everyone slept that night. Perhaps almost no one did. The rain pulse on the roof had stopped, replaced by a stillness, a little breeze that might have been the sound of withdrawal, of an ebb, of a tide going out where there'd never been a tide before. Don Luigi Stefani, a priest who lived at the Misericordia across the piazza from the Baptistry and the Duomo, prayed and wrote in his journal, and although he kept himself free from despair-he'd brought the Blessed Sacrament from the chapel downstairs into his room for safety-the words in the journal might have been spoken by Job. The Arno had become a lash, flagellating the church and the city; the ribbon of heating oil now running through and over it was a black serpent that licked the altars of Florence. G.o.d, it seemed, had deserted the city.

More than once, Don Stefani wrote, Signore, dormi? Signore, dormi?, "Lord, are you sleeping?" The night wore on. He took comfort in his prayers. It was out of the sea, the tempest, the flood that Jesus had called his apostles and comforted them. But Don Stefani himself slept fitfully. Across the piazza, perhaps one hundred feet away, Ghiberti's great Baptistry doors of bronze, half-ripped from their frames, clanged with the flow and swell of the ebbing water, tolled like sad, infernal bells.

Later, near the dawn hours with the water down a few feet, you might have been able to make out one of those ubiquitous Dante wall plaques by the moon-a crack had opened in the clouds; the rain had stopped-scarcely a block toward the river from Azelide Benedetti's apartment. It read, Per mezza Toscana si spazia / Un fiumicel che nasce in Falterona, / E cento miglia di corso nol sazia Per mezza Toscana si spazia / Un fiumicel che nasce in Falterona, / E cento miglia di corso nol sazia, "Through the middle of Tuscany a little river spreads itself that's born on Falterona; and a course of a hundred miles is not enough for it."

3.

Miraculously, again, the journalists of La n.a.z.ione La n.a.z.ione brought out a paper the next morning. They'd sent their copy over the mountains to Bologna, where it was composed and printed on the presses of a Bologna daily, brought out a paper the next morning. They'd sent their copy over the mountains to Bologna, where it was composed and printed on the presses of a Bologna daily, Il Resto del Carlino. Il Resto del Carlino. The headline was "Florence Invaded by Water: The City Transformed into a Lake: The Greatest Tragedy in Seven Centuries." The headline was "Florence Invaded by Water: The City Transformed into a Lake: The Greatest Tragedy in Seven Centuries."

No one could yet say how severe the damage was. By dawn, the river had fallen fifteen feet, but that still left a yard of water standing inside the Uffizi. The artworks inside had been saved, but the city was devastated: thousands of Florentines were marooned inside their apartments and hundreds trapped on rooftops. There was no drinking water, no milk, no fresh food or bread, no heat, light, or telephone. Happily, the city's hospitals were all outside the flood zone and there, as well as in more makeshift delivery rooms, twenty-four Florentines appeared who would be able to claim the historic date of November 4, 1966, as their compleanno. compleanno.

But as on the previous day, Santa Croce suffered most, unheard and seemingly despised. At the neighborhood's heart, the market square of Piazza dei Ciompi, there was still fifteen feet of water. And for all the beauty of the art saved at the Uffizi, people here were suffering like Jesus and Francis. People were cold and tired; people were hungry and thirsty; people were injured or sick; some of them might be dying or dead. It would be late afternoon before a soldier from the local barracks could reach Azelide Benedetti. He had to dig the mud out of the stairs and break down the door. Inside, wading through the sump of her apartment, he found a kitchen knife and cut her drowned corpse free, still lashed to the wheelchair and the window, suspended. For lack of a stretcher, never mind an ambulance or a hea.r.s.e, they carried Azelide out on a clothes rack.