mud angels
On November 4, 1966, the Arno River leapt its banks, flooding the streets of Florence. Over a hundred people died, centuries-old frescoes and paintings were damaged, and cars were strewn about like empty oilcans. Thousands of illuminated manuscripts were unbound and scattered, their pages slick with slime and stuck to street and stone.
In response to the destruction, groups of young people began a rescue effort. Ted Kennedy, who flew to Florence to observe the damage, “saw students up to their waists in water. They had formed a line to pass along the books so that they could be retrieved from the water and then handed on to a safer area to have preservatives put on them.” The students, who became known by the locals as angeli del fagno, or “mud angels,” were an international, ad hoc, amateur team of rescuers. A surprising number had conservation experience; many more were just students or able-bodied admirers of the art. Susan Glasspool, a mud angel who was 22 at the time, later recalled that
At the beginning we experimented: no one had ever had to remove oil and mud from ancient volumes. I still remember that every now and then we heard an explosion: it was someone who was trying to make a glue and was mistaking the components. From those attempts, however, the best book restorers in the world were born.
In an interview marking the 30th anniversary of the flood, Former Mayor of Florence Mario Primicerio remarked that “Although it was not at all clear at the start, […] what we were doing was dictated by the desire to give back the traces of the history of the past to future generations, so that it could be used for the spiritual growth of people who perhaps had yet to be born.”
Sitting in my New York apartment on Wednesday night, watching videos of the grimly named “Remnants of Ida” swamping lower parts of the City, I kept coming back to these black and white photos from Florence, half a century ago. That idealistic, international, effective, and even joyous salvage effort felt distant from the reactions of the moment. As apartments swelled with sewer water, Twitter churned with the nihilistic sneers of the well-followed commentariat, along with hundreds of quips from influencers that amounted, more or less, to the dog-in-a-burning-building meme.
In this season of freak weather, American individualism casts long shadows of loneliness and peril: every man an island, and all the islands underwater. On Friday, I went biking with a friend whose basement apartment had flooded. She had to dismount to wearily talk to the landlord, the insurance people, the people telling her to get in touch with FEMA. The mood was bleak, and made bleaker by the fact that she had flooded weeks previously, when Tropical Storm Henri brought rains to New York.
It’s easy, and perhaps naïve, to romanticize the mud angels. Even now, a large conservation backlog from that flood remains. But as climate change, long-foretold, gathers into a great unending storm, the angeli are worth keeping in mind. So much lost yet not all of it; so many willing to search the mud for what’s left.
In his book Dark Water, Richard Clark describes a scene from Florence:
You could hear music from someone’s transistor radio—it was the Beach Boys, usually—and the angels needed music, just as they needed to stop and smoke a cigarette, not just to relax but to keep warm, heating themselves from inside out. It was always cold and always damp where they worked, and often where they ate and slept. There was, of course, a surfeit of Chianti dispensed from immense demijohns just as there was limitless talk and laughter. People fell in love: with art; with one another; with themselves.
How good we seem to have gotten at the latter.
ben tapeworm