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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 945.5110926
EAN num: 9780767926485
ISBN number: 076792648X
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: October 07, 2008
Publishing house: Doubleday
Release Date: October 07, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 11264
Studio: Doubleday
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This dramatic, beautifully written account of the flood that ravaged Florence, Italy, in 1966 weaves heartbreaking tales of the disaster and stories of the heroic global efforts to save the city’s treasures against the historic background of Florence’s glorious art.
On November 4, 1966, Florence, one of the world’s most historic cities and the repository of perhaps its greatest art, was struck by a monumental calamity. A low-pressure system had been stalled over Italy for six weeks and on the previous day it had begun to rain again. Nineteen inches fell in twenty-four hours, more than half of the annual total. By two o’clock in the morning twenty-thousand cubic feet of water per second was moving towards Florence. Soon manhole covers in Santa Croce were exploding into the air as jets of water began shooting out of the now overwhelmed sewer system. Cellars, vaults, and strong-rooms were filling with water. Night watchmen on the Ponte Vecchio alerted the bridge’s jewelers and goldsmiths to come quickly to rescue their wares. By then the water was moving at forty miles per hour at a height of twenty-four feet. At 7:26 a.m. all of Florence’s electric civic clocks came to a stop. The Piazza Santa Croce was under twenty-two feet of water. Beneath the surface, twelve feet of mud, sewage, debris, and oil sludge were starting to ooze and settle into the cellars and crypts and room after room above them. Six-hundred-thousand tons of it would smother, clot, and encrust the city.
Dark Water brings the flood and its aftermath to life through the voices of witnesses past and present. Two young American artists wade heedlessly through the inundated city carrying their baby in order to witness its devastated beauty: the Ponte Vecchio buried in debris and Ghiberti’s panels from the doors of the Florence Baptistery, lying heaped in yard-deep mud; the swamped Uffizi Gallery; and, in the city libraries, one billion pages of Renaissance and antique books, soaked in mire. A Life magazine photographer, stowing away on an army helicopter, arrives to capture a drama that, he felt, “could only be told by Dante” amid the flooded tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo in Giotto and Vasari’s Santa Croce. A British student, one of thousands of “mud angels” who rushed to Florence to save its art, spends a month scraping mud and mold from Cimabue’s magnificent and neglected Crocifisso as intrigues and infighting among international art experts and connoisseurs swirl around him. And during the fortieth anniversary commemorations of 2006 the author asks himself why art matters so very much to us, and how beauty seems to somehow save the world even in the face of overwhelming disaster.
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In addition to skillfully selecting especially interesting and informative events and facts, Robert Clark writes beautifully! This book is a particularly enjoyable read and much more than a history of the 1966 flood. Dark Water reads like a combination of history, novel, adventure, and an essay of profound personal reflection. The subtitle, Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces, is apt.
This book is about much more than the 1966 disaster. In part, it even includes a look at Florence during WWII connecting the disparate artistic sensibilities of Mussolini, Hitler, and legendary art historians Bernard Berenson, and Frederick Hartt. To a greater extent, it relates a compelling, moment by moment, description of the flood with an emphasis on human interest--honestly, you'll feel like you're there. It introduces some of the complex issues of art restoration in ways that would make even my dog care about the subject. Finally, Dark Water is a very personal reflection. Clark introduces characters--the Arno itself becomes a living presence--who experience the flood firsthand, and he then weaves the common threads of their lives up to the present. He manages all of this by relating experiences; he is never didactic or pedantic.
I was so impressed by Dark Waters I went looking up all the reviews I could find to see if my opinion was shared. All the reviews are glowing, but none of them does the book justice (and my comments here are certainly inadequate). I would have been satisfied simply reading the facts and stories Clark relates. However, this was so much of joy to read that I found myself stopping and rereading portions just to savor his prose and his insight--for example, "But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps--in contemplating and tending those insults and injuries--that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist."
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