Flood in Florence, 1966: A Fifty-Year Retrospective

Loss Is the Norm

As we celebrate progress in building and nurturing a profession, we should be mindful of the broader context of our work. The fields of preservation and conservation may be the only professions that have in their purview the entire scope of recorded history, ranging from ancient papyrus to today’s equally fragmentary resources in digital form. At the heart of what conservators and preservation specialists do is understand risk in material terms over time and then undertake the complex choreography of balancing the cost of investing in preventative or restorative actions with the value of the cultural heritage artifacts under their care. The sheer scale of the Flood in Florence challenged every then-existing notion of systematic action. The immediate consequence of early recovery efforts was the creation of a community of veterans committed not only to sustaining the recovery effort in Florence but also to nurturing the growth of the preservation field itself.

The preservation field has a history that predates the Flood in Florence and roots that are grounded in the development of the modern research library, the foundational principles of the archival profession, and the core mission of today’s museums. In 1946, two full decades before the Florence Flood we are considering here, Pelham Barr had already coined the term responsible custody to describe the centrality of conservation to the library: “It is the only . . . function which should be continuously at work twenty-four hours a day. It is the only function which should be concerned with every piece of material in the library from the moment the selector becomes aware of its existence to the day it is discarded.”[3] Indeed, preservation and conservation are two of the most important functions that unite all cultural heritage organizations.

Although the Flood in Florence of 1966 is a dramatic story of community action, it is also a cautionary tale about professional hubris. Social and community memory is understood from the fragments of what has survived the destruction of war, willful ignorance, and the ravages of Mother Nature. Over the course of recorded history, impulses to save and protect have always competed directly with motives to discard and struggles with the natural environment. It is surely ironic that we could not understand the classical world as well as we do without the dumps, wells, and latrines that held the first fragments of paper for millennia. Until the modern university vested libraries and archives with the responsibility to preserve sources for scholarship—merely two centuries ago—the rich, the powerful, and the religious chose what to keep and what to save. The human sciences would be an impossibility without the princes and priests who appreciated the beauty, rarity, or communicative power of books and works of art. In the symposium, we took a distinctively retrospective view of preservation over decades that many of us have experienced directly. Those of us committed to the societal value of conscious and systematic preservation and conservation must accept the tenuousness of our professional claims of virtue. In the proceedings of the symposium, we offer few predictions on the future of our profession; but we are mindful of the shifting sands of resource allocation and the perceived decline in the essentialness of cultural artifacts.

Writing about the Florence Flood

Over the past fifty years, much has been written about the Florence Flood, particularly in the decade or so immediately following the disaster. Giorgio Batini provides a contemporary account of the damage to Florence’s cultural property.[4] Sheila Waters draws extensively on the letters she exchanged with her husband, Peter Waters, as he led the British team’s recovery and conservation efforts.[5] Peter Waters’s own account of book and binding restoration is practically a primary source document for understanding the scale of the challenge in the immediate aftermath of the flood.[6] Katherine Taylor kept a diary in the period surrounding the flood and drew upon it for her remembrance on living through it.[7] Robert Clark provides a firsthand and accessible account of the Florence Flood and its impact on art without delving too deeply into the specifics of book and paper recovery and conservation.[8] Swietlan Kraczyna’s photographic essay on the flood is a compelling documentary record of the Arno River’s devastation, recorded on the day of and those following the flood.[9]

Not all the interesting writing on the Florence Flood are nonfictional accounts. Robert Hellenga’s novel imagines the experience of one of the Mud Angels who volunteered to salvage, clean, and treat the thousands of damaged books pulled from libraries.[10] David Hewson’s murder mystery, set in Florence, uses the 1966 flood as an anchor and a recurring theme.[11]

Perhaps most endearing is a collection of art created by children in the immediate aftermath of the Flood in Florence.[12] University of Florence professor Giuliana Pinto provides an afterthought to the proceedings on the therapeutic value of the art produced by children in Florence in the year after the flood. The Italian government adapted one of the drawings for a postage stamp commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the flood[13] and released it (coincidentally) on the second day of the symposium in Ann Arbor.[14] A website developed by the Università degli Studi di Firenze assembled a host of commemorative projects, news items, and background information for events that took place in Florence around the time of the fiftieth anniversary.[15]

Sherelyn Ogden, who we were honored to welcome to the symposium, reviewed the library conservation literature written before and after the flood with an eye toward assessing impact on the field. She found that most of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the flood had begun prior to it: “The flood brought conservation to public attention at a time when funds were available to exploit that attention, with the result that progress was accelerated rather than a new direction being taken.”[16] In his comprehensive review of news coverage of the flood, David Alexander found a new, if temporary, status granted to the academic and technical expertise of the conservator.[17] In a more recent review, Luciana Lazzeretti and Francesco Capone credit the cross-fertilization between scientific and humanistic knowledge gathered in Florence for spurring significant new advances in chemistry within the conservation sciences.[18] On an even grander scale, Dennis Rodwell credits the Flood in Florence as the trigger event that led to the establishment of the UNESCO World Heritage program, which now has more than one thousand sites.[19]

In 2006, ten years ago, the Villa La Pietra in Florence and the New York University Conservation Center collaborated to host an international symposium on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Flood in Florence. Major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fostered a reunion of dozens of experts who had rushed to Florence and spent weeks, months, or even years in salvage and recovery activities. British conservator Christopher Clarkson noted at the symposium that, in training people to do the work of recovery, “we started to deliberatively apply the word ‘conservation’ to our activities” in an attempt to “show a distinct philosophical break with [the] hand-binding and tradecraft conventions” that had preceded them.[20] In the intervening years, the concept of conservation has come to be universally recognized as the suite of perspectives, techniques, and ethical standards that motivate actions to stabilize and restore the usability of cultural heritage artifacts across all media.

The proceedings of the 2006 symposium constitute a rearview mirror portrait of the immediate aftermath of the flood. The emphasis of that conference, driven in part by the priorities of the organizers, was on artistic artifacts, including paintings and sculpture. The proceedings convey the vibrancy of the international collaborative effort and transmit four decades forward some of the energy and creativity marshaled in the several years immediately following the flood. The proceedings of the fortieth anniversary symposium summarize the most important lessons learned about physical treatment of water-damaged cultural resources of all forms across several millennia, lessons learned by experts, lessons learned from making mistakes under pressure and duress, and lessons learned through spontaneous innovation. For the fiftieth anniversary symposium, we elected not to revisit in detail the innovative recovery work done in Florence but instead to focus on the longer-term impacts of that innovation on subsequent conservation and preservation practices.

There remains some debate in the literature as to whether the work of recovery is finished. Scott Devine argues for completeness by pointing out that all materials damaged in the 1966 flood have been stabilized and adequate bibliographic control has been established for all materials that survived.[21] Others lament the lingering backlog of items needing conservation treatment. African conservation specialist Joe Nkrumah returned to Florence for the fortieth anniversary and found that “the job we started has never progressed and is far from its conclusion.”[22] Antonio Paolucci highlights the impact of the restoration laboratory in Florence and its continuing commitment to treatment in spite of inadequate resources for the job at hand.[23] For the fiftieth anniversary symposium, we chose to avoid debate over progress in recovery from the Flood in Florence and instead cast a wider net on the idea of impact and the implications of the flood for the preservation and conservation professions.

The Symposium Program

To explore the impact of the 1966 Flood in Florence at the fiftieth anniversary mark, the organizing committee filled the better part of two days with two stage-setting presentations, four theme talks clustered around three panel discussions, and a closing keynote address. In the midst of the papers and panel discussion, a “movie night” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art screened two rare films made in the immediate aftermath of the flood. Following the symposium, participants inaugurated an exhibition in the Stephen S. Clark Library curated by Cathleen Baker on book and binding repair in Florence in the years immediately following the flood.

The symposium began with a photographic essay by University of Minnesota professor John Comazzi. He drew on a selection of images of the flood from the contemporary work of architectural photographer Balthazar Korab, who was present in Florence at the time of the flood. The visual record communicates the damage of the flood more powerfully than even the words of witnesses recorded at the time.

Following the visual portrait was a personal memoir by Sheila Waters, the wife of distinguished conservator Peter Waters, who led the British team in establishing a systematic approach to the recovery and conservation of thousands of books in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Waters’s reflections on the innovative treatment strategies developed in Florence under great pressure established a bridge across the fifty years separating us from the aftermath of November 4, 1966. In association with the symposium, Sheila Waters unveiled her memoir of her life with Peter Waters in Florence.[24]

The first theme panel started with remarks by the distinguished conservator Don Etherington, who is one of the few living veterans of the rescue and salvage operation in Florence. Three conservators formed a panel to extend Etherington’s insights as they have played out across multiple generations of professionals. Conservator Beth Doyle outlined the transmission of new conservation knowledge in print and through education and training programs, foreshadowing a full panel discussion on education at the end of the symposium. Conservator Sherelyn Ogden, who conducted the seminal analysis of the published literature on the Florence Flood, reflected on the impact of the recovery effort on the ethics of the conservation profession. Conservator Julia Miller turned a critical eye on how advances in conservation techniques and best practices are and are not communicated in the professional literature.

University of Michigan art historian Megan Holmes presented her scholarship on the consequences of the Flood in Florence on conservation and connoisseurship of works of art. Her essay serves as an important link to the fortieth anniversary symposium proceedings and also serves as a reminder of the devastating (and lingering) impact of the flood on Florence’s painting and sculpture collections.

As we know all too well, the larger destructive forces of natural and human-made disasters do not single out libraries, archives, and museums for special abuse. In the second of three theme panels, Jeanne Drewes, who is responsible for binding and collections care at the Library of Congress, introduced some of the most important topics that surround disaster preparation and mitigation of library collections. Being prepared and capable of rapid response in a natural or human-made disaster is a professional competency that can be traced directly to the lessons learned in Florence during recovery. Leading the panel discussion, preservation librarian Nancy Kraft demonstrated with stories from her own career how important it is to plan and train for water-based calamities. Preservation administrator Doris Hamburg provided a deeper dive into the development of disaster planning strategies and revealed the national and international networks of best practices for responding to natural and human-made disasters. Conservator and preservation administrator Shannon Zachary brought the story of disaster mitigation into the digital age with a summary of how key ideas in traditional settings are being mapped to collections of digital information.

The third theme panel, on education and training, featured a thorough essay by Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa, who is a distinguished and accomplished educator of conservation and preservation professionals. Cunningham-Kruppa reviewed the history of graduate education programs, beginning with the first formal degree program at Columbia University and ending with speculation on the road ahead for graduate training. In her panel commentary, conservator Morgan Adams reported on her experience of cotraining in library and archives conservation in an art conservation graduate program. Conservator and publisher Cathleen Baker recounted the path of conservation training since the early 1980s and focused attention on the potential of an emergent graduate education program. The third panelist, conservator John Dean, broadened the perspective on conservation education to encompass international training programs in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The closing keynote was presented by Michael Suarez, SJ, who directs the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and is on the faculty of the Department of English. At the symposium, he had the unenviable task of focusing the attention of participants on the lessons of the Flood in Florence for dealing with a flood of a different sort that is sweeping across the land—a veritable deluge of digital data from two streams: the digitization of cultural heritage resources at scale and the ubiquitous presence of born-digital documents. Lessons learned from a half century of conservation treatment efforts may shed important light on the enduring values of the material world of books and works of art and help inform strategies for preservation in a digital environment.

Participants in the symposium were treated to the rare experience of viewing two important and rare films on the Flood in Florence that have never been screened together. For these proceedings, special collections conservator Bryan Draper introduced Florence: Days of Destruction, shot in the immediate aftermath of the flood by the Florentine film director Franco Zeffirelli, who was editing his Taming of the Shrew in Rome when the flood struck. The English version of the film that was screened in Ann Arbor is narrated by Richard Burton. Cathleen Baker introduced the second film, The Restoration of Books, Florence, 1968 by Roger Hill, instructor of filmmaking at the Royal College of Art, London. The film documented the conservation and restoration efforts at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, where hundreds of thousands of books were damaged during the flood. The film has scenes of the conservation of mud-covered, battered books as well as hands-on demonstrations of a limp vellum binding by Christopher Clarkson and a full-leather binding completed by Peter Waters.

Preparing the Proceedings

The proceedings are an edited compendium of the remembrances, facts, and ideas presented at the fiftieth anniversary symposium. The leaders of each of the three theme sessions (book and paper conservation, disaster preparedness, education and training) prepared a draft paper in advance of the symposium and circulated it to the panelists, who then prepared their own draft remarks cognizant of the major points made in the theme papers. Following the symposium, which was recorded in full, participants received a transcript of their remarks and were invited to revise and extend their contributions for the published proceedings. The organizing committee reviewed all the submissions, and the editors of the symposium proceedings made editorial changes to improve readability and consistency of presentation, seeking input from authors as appropriate.

The symposium proceedings are published simultaneously in print and digital formats by Michigan Publishing Services of the University of Michigan. The imprint represents a new model of publishing that makes high-quality scholarship widely available in print and online through streamlined selection, production, and distribution processes. The imprint is optimized for scholarship produced under the auspices of the University and operates on a cost-recovery model to minimize production overhead.

Some Salient Insights

The symposium organizers clustered the presentations into themes that we thought would resonate with the participants. As revised and extended papers, however, the proceedings volume lends itself to finding crosscutting ideas. Here are five for the consideration of readers. There are surely more to be found.

Almost every speaker mentioned the challenges of funding conservation treatment work and the ongoing education of conservators. A consistent point in the education and training panel is the vital and ongoing role that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has played in the emergence of conservation education as a graduate degree specialization. The Mellon Foundation supported the fortieth anniversary symposium and continues to foster the endowment of professional conservator positions in research libraries across the country. Credit is also due to the Mellon Foundation for helping reenvision conservation education in the future. Often in parallel over the years, the National Endowment for the Humanities has supported initial graduate education initiatives at Columbia University and then at the University of Texas. Other federal granting agencies, particularly the Institute for Museum and Library Services, have encouraged innovation in practice-based internships and continuing professional education initiatives.

At least half of the symposium papers stress the high level of technical skill and manual dexterity that is required for effective and efficient conservation treatment. The speakers differ markedly, however, in the role that materials science, organic chemistry, and other hard sciences play in the education and training of conservators and in bench practice. Several papers come close to claiming conservation as a science unto itself, while other papers suggest that the requirement for core science skills limits diversity of student pools and lends a false sense of rigor to physical treatments, which may be as much art as science.

The requirement in Florence to work at scale—hundreds of thousands of bound volumes and hundreds of works of art needed prompt attention—has profoundly influenced the ethics, the practice, and the training of conservation. Indeed, Christopher Clarkson (through the fortieth anniversary proceedings) and Don Etherington (at the symposium) emphasize that the very nature of conservation works at scale and in phases, seeking to maximize impact and efficiency while minimizing treatment work beyond what is necessary to make bindings and texts usable into the future. The focus on scale also plays out in triage activities that become necessary in the wake of water or fire disasters. In spite of an ethical focus on scale and impact, conservation treatment in the end takes place one item at a time and remains costly and time consuming.

In assembling the symposium program, the organizers were acutely aware that the passage of fifty years from the Florence Flood of 1966 means that knowledge lives and grows only through cross-generational transfer. The symposium participants demonstrate through their presence and distinctive perspectives on conservation and preservation that the field is alive and thriving, if challenged in a number of important ways. Two scholars (Comazzi and Holmes) provided intellectual depth and context to the events in Florence in 1966. Two of the papers (Etherington and Waters) represent the views of the first generation of conservators and educators who learned directly from the Florence Flood recovery efforts. We were graced by their presence in Ann Arbor. Another group of three papers (Baker, Dean, and Ogden) demonstrate the impact of learning directly from those who were present. This “second generation” translated these associations into a passion to combine treatment with the education and training of the next generation. The symposium featured seven presentations by professionals (Cunningham-Kruppa, Drewes, Hamburg, Kraft, Miller, and Zachary) across a range of archive and library specialties who might collectively be called the “third post-Florence generation.” One common denominator of this group of “mature” professionals is their experience with and commitment to preservation administration that encompasses both leadership in conservation treatment as well as a full suite of preventive preservation activities, especially disaster preparedness and building environment management. The symposium also produced two papers from a cohort of “fourth-generation” preservation and conservation professionals (Adams and Doyle). Formally trained, technically sophisticated, and savvy with social media and communications, this generation carries on the tradition of professional commitments that emerged from the waters of Florence.

A final crosscutting theme of the symposium papers is the continuing social, cultural, economic, and research value of the original artifact. We most certainly are living in a digital world that is rapidly transforming access to and use of cultural heritage resources. But the special aura of the rare book, unique manuscript, or original work of art telegraphs human creativity across time and space in ways that flat and dissembled digital data cannot accomplish. The artifacts collected, protected, and served in the nation’s libraries, archives, and museums embed honest truths about the human condition and, through their conservation and preservation, stand as testimony to our resilience.

Notes

1. De Zolt, S., Lionello, P., Nehu, A., and Tomasin, A. “The Disastrous Storm of 4 November 1966 on Italy.” Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Science (Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union) 6, no. 5 (2006): 861–79.

2. Panattoni, Lorenzo, and James R. Wallis. “The Arno River Flood Study (1971–1976).” EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 60, no. 1: 1–5.

3. Barr, Pelham. “Book Conservation and University Library Administration.” College & Research Libraries 7 (July 1946): 214–19.

4. Batini, Giorgio. 4 November 1966: The River Arno in the Museums of Florence: Galleries, Monuments, Churches, Libraries, Archives and Masterpieces Damaged by the Flood. Translated from Italian by T. Paterson. Florence: Bonech, 1967.

5. Waters, Sheila. Waters Rising: Letters from Florence. Ann Arbor, MI: Legacy Press, 2016.

6. Waters, Peter. “Book Restoration after the Florence Floods.” Penrose Annual 62 (1969): 83–93.

7. Taylor, Kathrine Kressmann. Diary of Florence in Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

8. Clark, Robert. Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence. New York: Anchor Books, 2009.

9. Kraczyna, Swietlan Nicholas. The Great Flood of Florence, 1966: A Photographic Essay. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.

10. Hellenga, Robert. The Sixteen Pleasures. New York: Soho Press, 2009.

11. Hewson, David. The Flood: A Mystery Set in Florence, Italy. Sutton, UK: Severn House, 2015.

12. Pescioli, Idana. Com’era L’acqua: I bambini de Firenze raccontano. 1967; Pontedera (Pi): Tagate Edizioni, 2016.

13. Loria, Danilo. “50° anniversario dell’alluvione di Firenze: Un francobollo celebrerà gli ‘angeli del fango’ Per approfondire.” Strettoweb, November 3, 2016. http://www.strettoweb.com/2016/11/50-anniversario-dellalluvione-di-firenze-un-francobollo-celebrera-gli-angeli-del-fango/477717/. Accessed March 18, 2018. See our translation from Italian:

14. PosteItalieane. “Angeli del fango.” https://www.poste.it/angeli-del-fango-filatelia.html. Accessed March 18, 2018.

15. Firenze 2016: 50th Anniversary of the Florence Flood. http://toscana.firenze2016.it/en/the-project/. Accessed October 13, 2017.

16. Ogden, Sherelyn. “The Impact of the Florence Flood on Library Conservation in the United States of America: A Study of the Literature Published 1956–1976.” Restaurator 3 (January 1979): 1–36.

17. Alexander, David. “The Florence Flood: What the Papers Said.” Environmental Management 4, no. 1 (1980): 27–34.

18. Lazzeretti, Luciana, and Francesco Capone. “Innovation and Innovators in a Resilient City: The Case of Chemical Innovations after the 1966 Flood in Florence.” City, Culture and Society 6, no. 3: 83–91.

19. Rodwell, Dennis. “The UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972–2012: Reflections and Directions.” Historic Environment: Policy & Practice 3, no. 1: 64–85.

20. Spande, Helen (ed.). Conservation Legacies of the Florence Flood of 1966: Proceedings of the Symposium Commemorating the 40th Anniversary. London: Archetype, 2009.

21. Devine, Scott W. “The Florence Flood of 1966: A Report on the Current State of Preservation and the Libraries and Archives of Florence.” The Paper Conservator 29, no. 1: 15–24.

22. Spande. Conservation Legacies, 85.

23. Paolucci, Antonio. Il laboratorio del restauro a Firenze [The restoration laboratory in Florence]. Turin, Italy: Istituto Bancario San Paolo di Torino, 1986.

24. Waters. Waters Rising.