Page 41 - Studio International - January 1967

anywhere in the world; 250,000 volumes were flooded the inundation of Somerset House by the Thames. The
and many have been lost. There was severe damage to Biblioteca Nazionale, which is by far the most complete
the libraries of the Kunsthistorisches Institut and the general library in Italy (it may be compared to the
University; in the latter, the staggering total of one British Museum Library), stands on the bank of the Arno
million pounds' worth of damage was done to books (in- near Santa Croce, and was flooded. At a conservative
cluding the Berenson Library, which seems to have been estimate, 300,000 of its five million volumes were flooded,
wiped out), furniture and experimental equipment; even and the stacks, which were filled with water to the ceiling,
the guinea-pigs in their cages in the Zoology department have still not yet been completely pumped out.
were drowned as the waters rose in the laboratories. The restoration bill for Florence will be immense. It will
Twelve thousand books were submerged in the Agrarian stand in the vicinity of twelve million pounds. And it is
Academy; in the State Archive, forty of the four hundred unlikely that the work can be completed for decades.
rooms of documents, housed in the Uffizi Gallery, were One of the facts of the situation, unpalatable though it
invaded by water to a depth of 5 feet; 40,000 volumes, may be to the amour-propre of certain Italian officials, is
containing 50,000,000 documents, were submerged. For that Italy—let alone Florence herself! —cannot possibly
an English parallel, one must, as an American professor absorb this bill; it must be paid, in substantial part, by
in charge of salvage work drily remarked to me, imagine foreign aid. q

Wrecked documents from the
Archivio di Stato (State
Archive), lying in the arcade
of the Uffizi loggia. Forty
rooms of the archives were
flooded to a depth of five feet;
40,000 volumes, containing
50,000,000 documents, were
damaged. These included
unique—and often unre-
searched —source material
for historical and art
scholars, dating back to the
fourteenth century and
earlier

Below left
Cleaning manuscripts

Below right
Books hung out to dry after
treatment with saddle soap