Florence
Page 8
Anyway, it rained a lot on that visit. (Pino Oriolo, among others, joked about the fact that the famously glorious Tuscan spring is often no more than a succession of drenched afternoons.) We found an apartment, then flew home, with the intention of returning at the beginning of July. On the evening of 27 May, back in the States, I turned on the television news and learned that a car bomb had exploded outside the Uffizi, destroying three paintings, damaging thirty other works, and causing grave injury to the museum and to many of the buildings around it, including the one that housed the Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio. The pensione was closed, and has never reopened.
During the first months we lived in Florence – the late summer and fall of 1993 – we would often walk to the end of the Chiasso dei Baroncelli in order to observe, through a gnarled barrier of scaffolding affixed with red and white tape, the piles of rubble, metal and plastic that were the bomb’s legacy. Down streets like these Lucy Honeychurch had gotten lost with Miss Lavish; now they were gutted quarries, reminiscent of those through which Michelangelo wandered. The devastation was so intense as to bring to mind photographs of the Lungarno and the Via Por Santa Maria after they were bombed by the Germans in the summer of 1945 – and yet on that occasion, at least, no great art had been destroyed. Starting in 1940, the Fascist government, with alarming foresight, had begun taking protective measures in the event that war should break out, padding some statues and removing others, along with the bronze baptistry doors, to a concrete shelter in the Boboli Gardens. At the Accademia, the Michelangelos were enclosed within brick silos. Many of the city’s paintings were taken out of Florence altogether, to be housed at some of the grander villas in the countryside, among them Montagnana, Poppiano and the Castello Montegufoni, which was owned by Osbert Sitwell’s father, Sir George Sitwell. In Laughter in the Next Room, the fourth volume of his memoir Left Hand, Right Hand!, Sitwell explains that Montegufoni was chosen
because it is situated in a remote district, but, still more, because the doors and windows of the chief rooms were big enough to allow the largest pictures to be carried in and out without risk of damage … here, very near what was to become for some days one of the most fiercely contested portions of the front line, was gathered together the rarest of all house – parties … among the very first arrivals, on the 18th of November [1942], were Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, the Cimabue Virgin Enthroned, the great Madonna of Giotto, and Botticelli’s Primavera.
For the grand sum of seventeen lire a day, Guido Masti, Sir George Sitwell’s retainer, was given the task of protecting works of art valued at the time at three hundred and twenty million dollars. Yet he was far from alone in the castle. In 1943 Cesare Fasola, then curator of the Uffizi, reputedly walked across the battle lines to Montegufoni, where he took up a protective stance among the paintings he loved. More surrealistically, as many as two thousand refugees ‘swarmed into the cellars and dungeons from towns as far away as Empoli and Castel Fiorentino: for the old reputation of Montegufoni as a stronghold had revived in the popular mind’.
There were, then, for some ten or fourteen days, these two populations: the huddled crowds of homeless and terrified souls in the darkness below, where, at any rate, it was comparatively safe, and on the ground floor above, in grave danger, hundreds of world-famous pictures, piled against the sides of the walls, in the lofty painted rooms and halls… . Next, the Germans arrived, occupied the Castello, and turned out the refugees. They lived in the rooms above, and often threatened to destroy the pictures, but Professor Fasola and Guido Masti continued somehow to preserve them. When the German General, on entering the Castle, uttered menacing words about these great canvases being in his way and that they should be burnt, Guido said to him, as only an Italian, with the natural imaginative rhetoric of his race, could say:
‘These pictures belong not to one nation, but are the possession of the world.’
Remarkably, almost none of the works housed at Montegufoni were damaged; an exception was a circular Ghirlandaio that the Germans had used as a tabletop, and that was consequently stained with wine, food and coffee, and scarred by knives.
In his memoir The Art of Adventure, Eric Linklater later recalled arriving at Montegufoni with the BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, not long after the Germans had fled. ‘Some refugees had been sleeping in the castello,’ he wrote; ‘… cheerfully perceiving our excitement, they were making sounds of lively approval, and a couple of men began noisily to open the shutters … Vaughan-Thomas shouted, “Uccello!”’
I, in the same instant, cried, ‘Giotto!’ For a moment we stood there, quite still, held in the double grip of amazement and delight … We went nearer, and the refugees came round us and proudly exclaimed, ‘E vero, é vero! Uccello! Giotto! Molto bello, molto antico!’ … Then I heard a sudden clamour of voices, a yell of shrill delight, and Vaughan-Thomas shouting ‘Botticelli!’ as if he were a fox-hunter view-hallooing on a hill. I ran to see what they had found, and came to a halt before the Primavera.
For foreigners living in Italy, the years leading up to the war had been difficult ones to endure. As a consequence of Mussolini’s rise to power and the invasion of Abyssinia, an unsuspected strain of intolerance mingled with nationalism had begun to reveal itself in the Italians, of whom the novelist Sybille Bedford – a teenager in Italy at the time – made this acute observation:
When their rules are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and showoffs, clever when they ought to be straightforward, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery.
There was certainly little compromise under Mussolini. Among other draconian reforms introduced by Il Duce, foreign words were expunged from the national vocabulary. ‘Autista replaced chauffeur,’ Acton remembered, ‘albergo hotel, and half the hotels in Italy had to be re-baptized in Fascist style, all the Eden Parks and Eden Palaces … besides the countless Albions, Bristols, and Britannias …’ An Italian ‘His Master’s Voice’ (‘La Voice del Padrone’) catalogue from the period advertises recordings by ‘Wladimiro Horowitz’ and ‘Sergio Rachmaninoff’, as well as compositions by ‘Luigi Beethoven’, ‘Wolfango Mozart’ and ‘Francesco Schubert’. Predictably, such xenophobia found its easiest target in Florence, with its ‘English Tea Rooms’ and ‘Old England’ shops. Now the walls of buildings were ‘scrawled all over with slogans which were meant to remind us that “La Guerra è bella” (War is beautiful),’ while the artificial inflation of the lira halved the incomes of old Englishwomen already living hand-to–mouth. Earlier, Acton had been impressed by the ‘super lounge-lizards’ cruising Via Tornabuoni, ‘all their goods in the shop window, [spilling] on to the pavement to inspect each passing ankle and compare notes in voices loud enough to be overheard’. Now these ‘unemployed Narcissi’ were taking as avidly to the Blackshirt uniform as they had previously to buttonholes, brilliantine and spats. Foreigners previously cultivated were persone non grate. Even Acton’s mother, Hortense, was taken into custody one afternoon, under the pretense that there was a problem with her passport. For three days and nights the elderly Mrs Acton, ‘in a flimsy summer dress without even a toothbrush’, was ‘immured among prostitutes and others of ill-repute …’
No message reached her from outside except an insolent letter from a Fascist female, wife of an art critic, telling her she had only got what she deserved, she might have been treated much worse, with the slogan ‘Il Duce ha sempre ragione’ (‘The Leader is always right’) appended to her florid signature. When my mother’s maid telephoned a powerful friend for help, he snapped back at her: ‘Don’t you realize that we are at war and that Mrs Acton is an enemy alien?’ That distinguished official had been a frequent guest in our house for a quarter of a century.
As a coda to this story, James Lord notes a detail th
at Acton, for the sake of bella figura, left out: in fact, the problem with Hortense Acton’s passport was not an invention; she had altered ‘the date of her birth to make herself appear a decade younger. Why she should have cared what customs officials and frontier police knew her age to be is a mystery, but a very significant clue must be looked for in the vanity and arrogance of the lady in question. Tampering with a passport, even for such a frivolous reason, may be considered a serious matter …’
In the event, as soon as she got out of jail, Mrs Acton left for Switzerland.
At last war broke out; by then all but the most entrenched colonists had, quite sensibly, fled Italy, though a few refused to abandon their houses, most notably the Jewish Bernard Berenson, who eventually had to go into hiding in the countryside. In his autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini, the director Franco Zeffirelli portrays a group of elderly English ladies – the sort for whom the adjective ‘indomitable’ is inevitably trotted out – who stick it out in Florence after war is declared and are consequently sent by the military to a makeshift prison in the hill town of San Gimignano. The film’s climactic sequence, in which Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright quite literally interpose themselves between the village’s famous medieval towers and the Germans who intend to bomb them – thus saving art from history – makes for a camp spectacle that recalls some of the graver excesses committed by Zeffirelli in his career as an opera director; yet as a fantasy, it also highlights the intensity of the foreign community’s devotion to the country they had adopted – and that they believed had adopted them.
In the end, the worst loss was that of the bridges that crossed the Arno, some of them hundreds of years old, and all of them, with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio, blown up by the Germans on 4 August 1944. Earlier the Swiss Consul, Karl Steinhauslin (after whom a Florentine bank is now named), had pleaded that the statues of the Four Seasons on the Ponte Santa Trinità be spared; they were not. After the liberation, divers scoured the bottom of the Arno for the statues, even as members of the all black American 387th Engineer Battalion set to work building temporary Bailey bridges of wood and steel in order to reconnect the two halves of the severed city. Eventually all four seasons were found, with the exception of spring’s head, at which point, Mary McCarthy recounts in The Stones of Florence, a rumor began circulating that ‘an American Negro soldier had been seen carrying it away during the fighting and confusion’. Posters went up all over the city, featuring a photograph of the statue, asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and offering a three-thousand–dollar reward for her safe return. But the head failed to reappear, and in 1958, after a precise replica of the bridge was built using precise replicas of sixteenth-century tools, the authorities had no choice but to return a headless spring to her old position on the northeast corner. (Only three years later, during work on the Ponte Vecchio, did the head turn up; it had not, as rumor claimed, been smuggled off to Harlem, or New Zealand, or buried in the Boboli Gardens, but had been at the bottom of the river all along.)
Today, although all the bridges that the Germans destroyed have been rebuilt, not all the Bailey bridges have been taken down; indeed, there is one near Galluzzo, on the outskirts of Florence, that we cross every time we leave to go to the country. Its wooden boards make a racket when the wheels of the car pass over them; we feel, for a few seconds, a worrisome vibration … and then we’re on solid ground again. Every time this happens I think, for a moment, of the liberation I wasn’t alive to witness, its much-heralded scenes – American soldiers giving chewing gum to children – as well as those that remain unnarrated: the black members of the 387th Engineering Batallion, prohibited from actually fighting because of their race, and now going quietly about the unglamorous job of making the city whole again. Little is recalled of them, yet they did as much to save Florence as any foreigner ever has, as much as Berenson, or Henry James, or Zeffirelli’s histrionic old Englishwomen. May their story, in all its amplitude, someday be told.
A river city, by its very nature, is a double city, and in this regard Florence is a cousin to Paris, Rome and Budapest; that is to say, in Florence, there are not so much two equal sides as a principal side and an ‘other’ side: just as Rome has Trastevere, Paris its rive gauche and Buda its Pest, Florence has the Oltr’arno – literally ‘across the Arno’ – a poorer zone with smaller houses, wandered by writers and drug addicts, butting up against the countryside. Oltr’arno’s heart is Piazza Santo Spirito, which, with its used-record shops and student bars, resembles more than any other part of Florence the Latin Quarter of Paris, despite the comparative remoteness of the university, which is to be found on the principal side of the Arno, the unnamed side, not far from Piazza Santissima Annunziata. Here, one Sunday a month, organic farmers from the Mugello and Chianti, many of them ex-hippies who passed their youth in these bars, gather to stage a market at which they sell honey and beeswax candles, homemade jam, wholegrain bread, clothes and leather goods, as well as flavorful, if not very pretty, vegetables. In contrast to the Duomo and Santa Croce, the severe façades of which were done up during Florence’s brief period as a capital, the church of Santo Spirito has a stark, unadorned front that suggests the asceticism of earlier centuries. In 1980, an artist’s co-operative headed by Mario Mariotti decided to redress this oversight by projecting on to Santo Spirito all manner of designs for a possible new façade; these included a fried egg (Gianni Melotti), a record album showing Nipper, emblem of ‘His Master’s Voice’ (Gesù Moctezuma), wrapping paper (Christo, of course), and, most sportively, the interior of the church projected on to its exterior (Marianna Gagliardi).
Now as then, young foreigners love Oltr’arno. Even the stuffy Henry James, visiting Florence in his youth, stayed near the Ponte Vecchio on the Oltr’arno side. ‘My room at the inn looked out on the river and was flooded all day with sunshine,’ he wrote.
There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of extreme antiquity, bulging and protruding over the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river, while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow medieval street.)
All this ‘brightness and yellowness’ was for James ‘a part of that indefinably charming colour which Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the river, and from the bridges and quays’. He writes of the Arno’s ‘silvered yellow’, just as Acton describes its water as being ‘a mellow yellow in the evening light; were it a little less muddy, it would pass for Orvieto wine’. Pictures from as late as the end of the nineteenth century show children and young men fishing in the river, or diving off the bridges to swim. All long gone: today, though canoes and skiffs ply its waters, no one would dare dive into the Arno; nor would a health-conscious person want to eat a fish caught in it. During the hottest part of the summer, the water level drops, the river becomes stagnant, sludge-green (I have never seen it yellow) and musky. Mice and rats scurry in the shallows and bats fly overhead in the muggy air. (’Guarda, it is so romantic, with the full moon and the topi swimming in the river!’ waxes our friend from Cozensa, the one who likes to dress as Cardinal Richelieu.) In the winter, on the other hand, when the rains come, the Arno is cappuccino-colored; it rushes violently, carrying oak and chestnut branches downstream from its source in the Mugello.
Flood is a constant threat. Although the Arno has overflowed its banks on dozens of occasions over the centuries, the worst floods have tended to take place at hundred-year intervals, usually in years with double or even triple digits: 1333, 1466, 1557, 1844, 1966. (The superstitious Florentine looks forward to another disastrous alluvione in 2055 or 2077.) These floods can start up with little or no warning. The flood of 4 November 1966 started off the night before as a heavy rain, and only began to threaten in the early hours of the morning. By two a.m., the
owners of some of the jewelry stores on the Ponte Vecchio, having been alerted by the night watchman on the bridge, were hurrying to their shops to rescue what they could of their stock. There was some worry that the ancient bridge itself might collapse, though it had survived other floods as well as the war. One shopkeeper later recalled seeing a Fiat 1100 butting at the window of his store.
More than 15,000 cars were destroyed during the flood. Perhaps because the average Florentine, in 1966, took great pride in owning a car – even a tiny, pumpkin-colored Fiat 500 – television footage shot in the immediate aftermath of the disaster has a curiously obsessive quality, as it bypasses churches and monuments to move from car to car to car: upturned, floating, muddrenched, oil-drenched. There is something funereal about this photographic record, the pictures of destroyed cars recalling the snapshots of the dead that Italians place on gravestones.
Less attention was paid to injured art, though in fact this was the graver consequence, since cars are replaceable and Renaissance frescoes are not. A catalogue prepared by UNESCO offers numbing evidence of just how much was damaged: 321 paintings on wood, 413 on canvas, 11 fresco cycles, 70 individual frescoes (a total of around 3,000 square meters of fresco), 14 sculptural groups, 144 individual sculptures (including several by Michelangelo), 22 of them in wood: in all, close to a thousand works of major historical importance. The rushing waters, which reached a height of nearly six meters inside the Duomo, tore the bronze doors off the Baptistry. Once these had subsided, a slimy, corrosive mixture of heating oil and mud, in places as much as four feet deep, remained in their wake; in this melma several of Ghiberti’s bronze panels were found steeping the next day.