Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces
 | By Robert Clark Doubleday, 2008, Hardcover |
|---|
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 city’s treasures against the historic background of Florence’s glorious art.
On November 4, 1966, Florence, one of the world’s 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 o’clock 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 bridge’s 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 Florence’s 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.
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 Ghiberti’s 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, “could only be told by Dante” amid the flooded tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo in Giotto and Vasari’s Santa Croce. A British student, one of thousands of “mud angels” who rushed to Florence to save its art, spends a month scraping mud and mold from Cimabue’s 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.
Title: Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces
Sales Rank: 34702 in Books
Author: Robert Clark
Publisher: Doubleday, 2008-10-07, Hardcover, 368 pages, ISBN: 076792648X
Package Dimensions: 9.37 x 6.54 x 1.5 inches, 1.32 pounds
- Beautiful Florence
- Dark Water is the story of the flooding of the Arno River in Florence in 1966. The author begins with a brief history of art and flooding in the city throughout history. This preface set up the 1966 events nicely.
Robert Clark details the hardship of the ordinary people of Florence in the days and weeks following the flood in November of 1966.… More reviews
- May not be exactly what you think
- I think readers will mostly be split on this book, depending on your interests. Are you most interested in the history of some of the major artworks of Florence or most interested in the flood as an event in a dramatic setting?
What I was hoping and expecting from this book is a telling of the history of the flood and especially the art restoration that followed, with… More reviews
- Triumph Over Disaster
- When I was nine years old I saw pictures in the old Life magazine of a terrible flood that had just devastated an Italian city I had never heard of: Florence. Although I knew nothing of the masterpieces that had been damaged or destroyed, I realized that the world had suffered a great loss. Eight years later, as a teenager making my first trip to Europe,… More reviews
- Good History of Florence, why it matters and of the flood itself
- I found this book to be a great history of the city of Florence and why its art matters so much to human civilization. Robert Clark does a great job in setting the table by giving a great back story on why Florence rose to such importance in the art world and also about its tempestuous relationship with the Arno river. He does a great job explaining… More reviews
- Good information on the flood, too much trivia
- I bought this book to revisit the 1966 flood. I was forced to stay in a Florence hotel at the edge of the Arno's normal bank for its duration. The author gives some splendid detail on this, past floods, German occupation and other good things to know. His research seems pretty good. Unfortunately somebody made him write about 100 pages… More reviews
