The event that confirmed and fixed my belief in the value of the Past in art, and the folly of speculations about its Future, happened in the late autumn of 1966. It was the Florence flood, a now remote event commemorated by small ceramic plaques that few tourists even notice: a wavy line, signifying water, and an inscription: Qui arrive l’Arno al notte de 4 Novembre 1966. “The Arno came up to here on the night of 4 November 1966.” Some of these are fixed to the wall so high above your head that you suppose, before passing one, that the message is a mistake. But it was not a mistake.
Dante Alighieri had called the river of his native Florence “the accursed and unlucky ditch”. The Arno I knew and had generally seen, in the hot months, was a ditch all right: a mere trickle of water, where kids splashed and old men dangled lines on long rods that never seemed to catch anything. However, in the late autumn of 1966 the rains were heavy and incessant. They deluged most of Tuscany and, especially, the Arno valley. Up came the river, turbid and roaring. By dawn on November 4, the water in the Santa Croce district was more than six metres (20ft) above the pavement.
And it wasn’t placid water, either. It had come roaring into the ancient maze of alleys, narrow streets and cockeyed piazzas like a fire hose into a beehive. Cars were lifted up and dumped on other cars, like copulating pigs; they crashed through shop windows, demolished doorways and knocked statues over. The water cascaded into elevator shafts and down basement stairs, and filled the cellars where householders had installed tanks of nafta, or heating oil. These at once ruptured and released a thick scum of oil to float on the turbulent surface. And the rain continued to pelt down in sheets.
When news of this debacle, which was rapidly turning into a disaster, reached London, nobody at first knew what to make of it — it was so fragmentary and often clearly untrustworthy. And no television reports were coming out yet. So I asked my superiors at BBC2 if I could please go down there with a skeleton crew and make one. Rather to my surprise, they agreed.
Our crew rented a Ford Taunus in Milan and arrived on the outskirts of Florence as night was falling. The city was a scary and unfamiliar sight. It was as dark as the pit. It had no electricity, no streetlights and (eeriest of all) few pedestrians. We needed almost an hour to get to the city centre, Piazza del Duomo. And there was an extraordinary sight: the shops around the piazza had been burst open by the water and the plastic mannequins in their windows, stripped naked by the surge, had been cast in gesticulating heaps before the cathedral facade, like ridiculously stylised human sacrifices.
Inside the cathedral, the water had not reached the great unfinished Pietà by Michelangelo, which stood on a plinth; but in all, some 100 sculptures were damaged, including the bronze panels on the Doors of Paradise by Ghiberti and Pisano. All one could see, in the darkness, were those squares of vacant dark bronze from which these exquisite narratives had been erased, like teeth bashed from a once perfect mouth.
Then I got out of the car to look closer and saw, sticking out of the pile of mud and gunk that accumulated round the bottom of the doorjamb, a metal corner. I hauled on it and, with difficulty, out came one of the panels. I felt like a fool, holding one of the more cherished masterworks of the Florentine Renaissance. What on earth was I to do with it? There was nobody about, nobody in charge. Eventually, I left it where it was, in the mud.
We drove on to Piazza della Signoria. In the uncertain light, the surface of the Arno looked swollen and glossy, like a new burn, and running — a barely credible sight — only a foot or two below the tops of the arches of the Ponte Vecchio. The public doors of the Uffizi gallery gaped ajar, and, on the shallow stone stairs that rose into the dark building, hastily salvaged objects were chaotically stacked. In my rubber waders, I slipped on the oily muck on one of the steps and fell sideways, nearly but not quite on top of a familiar face — Donatello’s blade-nosed painted terracotta bust of the 15th century Niccolo da Uzzano.
The worst hit part was around Santa Croce, because it was the lowest lying. The three main historical buildings on the piazza were the church of Santa Croce, its attached museum and the Pazzi Chapel, designed by Brunelleschi. All had been partly submerged by the flood. Inside the church of Santa Croce, the water rose to 16ft. This building is the St Paul’s of Italy: among others, Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo are buried there. The water came level with the top of Michelangelo’s sarcophagus. When we got there, the water had drained away but the church was still a sea of mud and rubble.
The promised lighting crew had arrived from Rome, but they brought with them nothing more powerful than a handheld sun gun — a poor little battery-powered thing that wasn’t much better than a large torch. I would take up my station in front of some suitably mud-and-oil defaced bas- relief and prepare to wring the viewer’s withers with a description of what had gone on. The light would click on, revealing practically nothing in the gloom beyond the critic’s concerned-looking face, with its becoming expression of serious cultural worry. The camera would look, or rather, peer at the damaged masterpiece and see darkness with a few vague bumps in it.
The film we brought back to the BBC was limited and, in places, grayed out almost to invisibility by the general lack of light. But it did something to mobilise public sentiment for the city, and I was proud of that. It also, I was told, helped encourage students and other young people to go there and help in the cleanup. These kids were not skilled, and not necessarily even art students, but they did heroic amounts of unpaid donkey work: nothing as glamorous as saving Leonardos and Botticellis, but lugging mud-soaked volumes up narrow stairs from basement archives or squeegeeing floors — filthy labour, which they did until they dropped from exhaustion and slept in corners. The people of Florence gratefully nicknamed them the angeli del fango, the mud-angels.
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I went back to Florence to join them later in the winter, and in the course of that trip I made two discoveries that could, with honesty, be called life-changing. The first was an encounter with a work of art: not a Florentine one, or even Italian. I planned a route that would take me through Colmar. It is the rarest of towns, in that it contains only one work of art of real note. But that painting is one of the most vivid and terrible utterances ever made by an artist. It is the so-called Isenheim Altarpiece, finished in 1522 by the German painter Matthias Grünewald.
