ABSTRACT. The Florence Flood of November 1966 & its aftermath Christopher Clarkson

Transcription

1 ABSTRACT Title: Speaker: The Florence Flood of November 1966 & its aftermath Christopher Clarkson The speaker was sent to Florence on 1 December 1966 Although hundreds of libraries and archives were affected in the flood, the small English book repair* team concentrated their efforts on the collections of The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze (BNCF) and were put to supervise a group of mainly Italian student volunteers. Some other nationalities were also involved. The main floor of the City power station was utilised, and during the first few weeks railway carriages on the sidings were used as sleeping quarters. With its main entrance fronting the river Arno, the National Library had taken the full force of the flood waters. Because of the fear of mould growth, the hundreds of thousands of soaked and mud- and oil- covered books were shovelled into lorries and taken to tobacco drying kilns. On their return, those that could be handled were sorted and washed where possible. Gradually various treatments were evolved, and the main entrance floor of the library was converted into vast workshops. Through the use of newsreel photographs and his own photographs the speaker will recall the flood, its extent and the types of damage which occurred. Although hundreds of libraries, archives, museums and galleries were extensively damaged the National Library will be the main focus of attention. [ Copyright held by C. Clarkson. Reproduction of any part without the holders permission is strictly prohibited]. *At the time, the word conservation was not used for library or archive materials, but only in reference to period objects and paintings. Indeed, Mr. Clarkson coined the phrase book conservation in 1967, in an attempt to show the need for a new philosophy.

2 2 THE FLORENCE FLOOD AND ITS AFTERMATH 4th November 1966 (Lecture by Christopher Clarkson, with one projector, and slides) Florence in the Autumn. The River Arno at a normal height. On 3rd November 1966 the Italian Army was preparing for Armed Forces Day and its Festivals on the next day, a public holiday to commemorate the Italian victory over the Austrians in the 1st World War. The banners flapped heavily in the driving wind and rain. That night the police received requests for help from villages up the Arno valley. The conditions of the rivers were giving cause for concern; in the countryside the people were driving their beasts to safety and abandoning their homes. At the Levane and La Penna dams in the VALDARNO feverish consultations were being held, and from those dams more than 2,000 cubic metres of water per second were pouring down towards Florence. At 2.30 p.m. the Civil Engineering Department agreed that there was "an exceptional quantity of water". Already the city drains were unable to cope with the weight of the water. Powerful jets were issuing from the manholes and gushing into the air. Cellars were already flooded around the Santa Croce and San Frediano areas. The first electricity failures were reported as fuses began to blow. There were fears for the safety of the Aqueduct. A 52 year old workman, hastening there from his village, reported that it was "a shambles, everything is going under". His body was found two days later in a tunnel choked with mud. He was the first victim. In one way it was lucky that it was a festival and holiday for if it

3 3 had been a normal working day the city would have been crowded with people and cars and thousands would have been trapped, but unfortunately it also meant that public buildings were locked and their staff were out of town. In the industrial outskirts of Florence tragedy struck when the waters of the Arno and its many tributaries invaded Osmannero & surrounding villages, there were many separate tragedies. In Florence itself the night watchmen concerned raised the first alarm with the jewellery shops on the Ponte Vecchio, who telephoned their employers. A few managed to save some precious items in the early hours of the morning, but then the waters burst through and sent the vast majority of their stock downstream. The night watchmen in the various museums and libraries were caught completely by surprise and had no time to save anything. Florence slept as the waters rose; it was probably about 4 am when the mass of water was discharged by the Valdarno dam because the engineers were afraid of its bursting, and the greater mass poured down from tributary rivers and reached the outskirts of Florence. At its height the floodwaters were travelling at 60 kilometres per hour. They swept away motorcars and trees, burst into churches, penetrated steel-lined strong rooms and ancient palaces alike, carrying objects along and hurling them about like projectiles. The Lungarno delle GRAZIE, gas, electricity and water supplies were cut off, adding to the chaos. The cities electric clocks came to a stop at 7.26 am.

4 4 There was no hope now of averting the tragedy. As part of the Arno embankment gave way disaster was overtaking Florence, and 90% of her inhabitants knew nothing of it. The city was cut in two and isolated from the rest of the world, unreachable by land or air, and utterly remote from the seat of government in Rome. Emergency generators in the hospitals supplied the only electric power, and by 8.30/9.00am they also had been stopped by the water. By this time the first victims, the old and the sick, already lay beneath the mud. All over a huge tract of countryside villagers were crying out for help in vain. By 8.00 am the army barracks were flooded. They hoped that the waters were at their height and that they could begin organising help in their high draft lorries, but within half an hour most of their lorries were under water. As doctors and nurses, working by candlelight, carried their patients up to higher floors, in one hospital at least their entire stock of food disappeared under water, oil and mud. Florence was now a trap. Huge landslides blocked roads leading to it, the Autostrada was cut both North and South. A state of emergency was never called. The narrow streets of the city acted as funnels, increasing the speed and height of the water. Its great force also compressed air into basements and in some cases caused floors above to burst, as in Santa Croce. By 9.45 am the flood burst into the Piazza del DUOMO. In all parts of the city the water was filling cellars and damaging central heating oil tanks. Vast quantities of black and greasy oil joined the flow of mud and water.

5 5 The air was filled with the noises of trapped people and exploding boilers. It was the oil that later bore witness to the magnitude of the flood, leaving a black tidemark across the facades of buildings. Slowly through the day of 4th November outsiders tried to help, but by nightfall people were still stranded in upper floors and on roofs. Officials got to the city in dribs and drabs; many could not get further than Piazzale Michelangelo high above the city. The rain had fallen incessantly all that day. As night fell no lights could be seen; there were no voices offering counsel, no searchlights, no bells. At its height the water reached over 22 feet in areas around Santa Croce; at about 8.00 pm on 4th November it started gradually to go down. In the first two days after the flood there was fear of epidemic, fear of escaped prisoners armed with stolen weapons, fear of explosions, fear of houses collapsing. The flood had totally overwhelmed the people of Florence, the local government and the State. It was several days before mechanical monsters appeared in all parts of the city. The State began to create some kind of order; machinery, technicians, engineers, troops, lorries, tanks and boats were all forthcoming. Medical supplies, food and drinking water began to be supplied. It had been hard for the City government to get across to Rome that there was an estimated 600,000 tons of mud, sewage and rubble smothering a city which had been a huge modern centre, as well as a treasure house of great art - that artistic masterpieces were going to pieces and ruin in a city

6 6 where there were 15,000 wrecked cars, 5,000 homeless families, a food shortage and 6,000 shops out of business. To quote Giovanni GRAZZINI; "Together with works of art, the libraries and the very life-blood of the City. Culture - in the shape of books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and journals - is the most vital fact of the life of Florence; it has been and still is the mainstay of the entire local economy, from the point of view of both industry and tourism." Estimates suggested that 14,000 movable works of art were damaged, plus 3-4 million books and manuscripts, to give a few examples. The destruction of Cimabue's Crucifix in Santa Croce must here stand for all such objects. To give some idea of the extent of the damage in a few of the Libraries and Archives:- The State Archives. of 300 rooms and 60 kilometres of shelving, about 40% of the collection was damaged. Archives of the Opera del Duomo. 6,000 volumes and documents, and 55 illuminated manuscripts were submerged. Biblioteca Nazionale. About 1,300,000 items were damaged, a third of their collection. The most important items buried in the mud included the large volumes of the Palatina and the greater part of the Magliabechi collection, which formed the core of the B.N.C.F. collection.

7 7 There were other major City archives damaged by the power of the water, for example the Archivio di Stato had one of its vaults collapse. There were many other libraries, and also valuable antiquarian books in private collections & with dealers who had their stock submerged or destroyed. Plus 30 Ecclesiastical Archives. Nine of the ten University Faculties suffered. Other period artefacts in Museums, Galleries and Churches, etc. are not mentioned here. Many of the buildings themselves had suffered. The Director of the B.N.C.F., Dr Casamassima the palaeographer, appeared early on Friday morning. It was not possible for him to cross the Arno, in spite of repeated attempts; but he managed to reach the Library by boat on Saturday morning. The B.N.C.F. is slightly set back from the Lungarno delle Grazie, at this point the river wall was first breached so the full force of the water struck the Library. This probably accounts for the extraordinary quantities of mud that piled up on the steps, forced its way into all the basement rooms and reached up to 2 metres on the ground floor. The spectacle that presented itself to Dr Casamassima s eyes when he finally got in to his library was devastating. The basements, catalogue, reading rooms and administrative departments had all been submerged. In parts of the ground floor where the lower one or two shelves of books were soaked, the books had expanded so much that they had broken the sides of the shelving, bringing the rest of the books down into the water. Books are hygroscopic, so even those well above the

8 8 floodwaters sucked up moisture. Any books in this condition will be damaged, damp paper; warmth and stale air are ideal conditions for germination of millions of mould spores, and within days books can be reduced to a squashy mass of rotting fibres. Over the next weeks the amount that was saved was probably due to the boldness and determination of the Director. He took upon himself the responsibility to open the doors to volunteer help. All agreed that the damp and sodden books and rooms must be dried as quickly as possible. On the flight over we thought that the more valuable material might be frozen until such time as it could receive careful attention (the technique of freeze-drying was not used until the mid 1970 s). However, so many millions of books were affected that even if there had been enough staff, the plant was not available, and in the early days of Florence there was no electricity. The cold weather helped, but it was difficult to explain to people that they must keep all the windows open; in those conditions mould began to grow 5-6 days after the books were taken out of the water. Books came out of the mud by human chain, care being taken not to open them, the surplus mud was scraped off, then they were loaded onto lorries and sent to drying Granaries and Tobacco kilns around Italy. Due to how they were loaded this drying method gave characteristic brown stripes to book edges. Funds for the rescue of all such items, including the books, came from Governments, UNESCO, and the International Committee for the Assistance of Museums, Works of Art, Libraries and Archives.

9 9 I want now to concentrate on the problems of one major Library. The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (B.N.C.F.) dates from the late 17th century, and was formed of the collection of Antonio Magliabechi and the Biblioteca Palatina, collected by the Medicis. It is probably one of the most important libraries in Italy. In the Biblioteca Nazionale over one million books were under water and/or mud. During the first few months the staff hardly left the Library. The flooded areas had to be cleared and cleaned, and urgent steps taken to prevent mould, a long term organization for repair work set up, all the public services overhauled and re-established and the remains of the 8 million card catalogue saved - partly by drying, partly by copying or photocopying. Also the Magliabechiana and Palatine catalogue, both in manuscript, were damaged; I should remind you that the 1960 s was before the computer age and therefore a library could not function without a catalogue, so this became a restoration priority. Early on the heaps of books were covered with sawdust to try to poultice out the moisture. Blotting paper was placed in others; the bulking of textblocks often distorted or broke the bindings. Volunteers spent weeks interleaving, using a wide range of papers, even mimeograph paper. Even green blotting paper was used, which was a mistake. After these papers became wet they had to be replaced, so interleaving was an endless task, and the handling of the wet text-blocks caused a lot of damage. In mid-november the British team of Roger Powell, Peter Walters, Dorothy Cumpsty and Tony Cains went out to Florence. Tony Cains moved there permanently in 1967.

10 10 Roger Powell and Peter Walters, to whom I had been a student, were in charge of organising the volunteer binders from various countries. Many simply came for no pay; some from institutions that let them come on full pay. At first German binder friends of the Director's wife had come and tried to set up a washing and drying scheme, organising the student volunteers at the railway Power station in a rather orthodox way - pulling books wet (which did much damage) and expecting the students to carry out binding procedures beyond their skills. But this did show Roger Powell, Peter Waters and Tony Cains that some radical and unconventional procedures would have to be devised to allow treatment en masse. They quickly devised a series of operations, which could be taught to the changing parties of students and volunteers. A plan was devised which was simple to operate, and which worked quite well. The end product being that sections of a book, cleaned, disinfected, pressed and collated in their correct order, it was hoped made resistant to fungus growth, and wrapped in brown paper. In this state they could be dispatched anywhere in the world ready for binding. As soon as the B.N.C.F. was dried out, in the early spring of 1967, the parcelled textblocks were stored there. To explain this a little more fully:- By the end of November 1966 the wet books were being sent by lorry to drying facilities such as tobacco kilns and granaries all over Italy. On returning, they were delivered to the Forte Belvedere. First the cakes of mud were cracked by flexing the sheet, and flaked off dry. This method of removing mud was the safest. Then the books were sorted out into

11 11 categories; some needed dismantling entirely, some had oil damage, some only minor washing, possibly without pulling. Because of the language difficulties, symbols for degrees of mud, oil, physical damage were designed. These were written boldly on a paper slip and placed in each book. Barbara Giuffrida, an American married to an Italian, became one of the main translators, and also took up binding. She helped me later with my training programmes. The books that needed dismantling entirely were given to the first batch of volunteers, who removed the distorted covers and separated the sections - usually by cutting through the threads where they showed on the exterior of the spine over the bands. As the Forte did not have an adequate supply of running water, the next stage had to be carried out in the far less romantic surroundings of the Florence Railway Power Station, where the Germans had worked earlier. Here we had to set up a washing facility, of which I was in charge over the first Christmas. We cleaned up the main floors as much as possible, and washbasins were set up in the central hall of the power station. We had tables nearby covered in plastic sheets and boards covered in plastic to support the paper sections while cleaning them under a running tap. We brushed any mould with Thymol dissolved in alcohol; a number of fungicides had been tried, the one in use over the first Christmas was 'Topane', manufactured by I.C.I. It was originally developed for impregnating in wrapping papers for fruit, being particularly resistant to the blue mould that can develop on tangerines and oranges.

12 12 Books that had been damaged by oil were not treated at the Power station; these were kept back at Forte Belvedere where they tried various solvents and Fullers Earth, with some success. At the Power Station we used 'soft hair' brushes to try to remove the fine mud particles. The sheets were then taken upstairs where many lines had been stretched, - a difficult job in such a vast building on which to hang the leaves to dry in currents of hot air, from the boilers. We made sure that the leaves from each section overlapped its neighbour, so as not to lose collation. After drying they were collated by a member of the Library staff, and given a brown paper wrapper. I remember one dreadful moment when a power station workmen opened a boiler door and the burst of hot air lifted all the bifolia off the lines and they drifted up into the high, cathedral like roof of the power station, then glided around on the warm air currents like seagulls, until they gradually descended, all of us were trying to catch them before they hit the oily machinery, dirty boilers or wet floor. Sending out books for re-binding to other countries was not altogether successful - the standards of re-binding were so uneven. I think as early as Christmas it was being argued that restoration and bindery workshops must be set up in the B.N.C.F. It had at one time been hoped that some English binders would go to the Archivio di Stato, but experience in the first month had shown that it was more satisfactory for a particular national team to deal with a particular library or archive. So it was agreed that the English stay and develop the workshops at the B.N.C.F.

13 13 Firstly the British team designed & set up a bindery for restoring the millions of saved books. Later a paper repair workshop to work firstly on 120,000 of the large format, fine print & colour plate books. By March 1967 the packed books were returning by 4-5 lorry loads a day and somehow room had to be found to house them above basement level. This necessitated the moving of almost the entire holding of the library. Dr. Casamassima declared that he will never again use the basement for storing books, this set up a problem of storage. The reading rooms and shelving had to be re-equipped & two, 'five-storey' bookstores in the quad of the library were constructed. By the spring of 1967 the B.N.C.F. had 2/3 English binders (changing), 2 librarians, 8 other employees of the Library, 8 trainee binders, 42 workmen and 81 student volunteers. The process consisted of 9 parts:- 1) selection of books for treatment, with specification of operations required, recorded on a card. Most of the procedures listed refer to the techniques required, the column headed 'SIMBOLI' needs explanation (R. Powell, P. Waters, T. Cains and others had devised the symbols as early as late November 1966):- fragment contained in envelope historically important - only to be dealt with by experts treated immediately after the flood incomplete take great care

14 14 light mud medium mud impregnated mud mould rebind no title covers missing upper cover missing lower cover missing leave alone different books blocked blue stains - biological origin collation part missing The card travelled through with its book, and was finally filed as a record. 2) The book was photographed 3) Preparation - the book s collation was checked, the covers removed & preserved in a case with the book's reference number if they were to be used in the new binding. Usually the leaves of the books need washing, so if necessary the sewing was removed and sections dismantled. 4) The book was then washed in warm water with a disinfectant Topane. 5) If necessary the paper was deacidified and buffered 6) The text-block was pressed 7) The text-block was dried - Sandy Cockerell and Italian engineers designed the drying cabinets. 8) The sections was reconstructed and text-blocks collated

15 15 9) Each volume was placed in a disinfected envelope to await final repair and binding specifications. At its height, this procedure produced volumes a day. Parallel with this the repair and binding went on. This is where new techniques were starting to replace the 18th and 19th century trade practices. The main reading room was adapted to the bindery. P. Walters designed the repair tables, and the binders' benches with presses set in them. In May 1967 a partly mechanised bindery was installed to deal with modern books and periodicals. During 1967 in addition to works bound locally in the library, many went to other countries. Governments and institutions offered their services, even the Queen of England. This caused many headaches, we had no idea of the skills and expertise being offered, and found ourselves in the minefield of international politics. An example of our new approach During Easter 1967 I had noticed that several small limp Vellum bindings had survived extremely well through the flood and the extremes of forced drying. They had certain features that I would now describe as 'conservation precepts, which made me re-think our conventional hand binding techniques. After numerous experiments on dummy blank books I taught my new techniques to the binding staff in BNCF. By Easter 1967, walking back to the Pensione Britannia, I would pass many unsafe buildings, but Florence often looked as beautiful as ever. In January 1972 I landed in America to take up a position as the first Head

16 16 of Conservation of Rare Books, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. My main brief was directed towards books and documents in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and for materials in the Department of Music, Maps and Geography, Law and Orientalia. Unlike the damaged books in Florence major rebinding programmes were not required but preservation & conservation certainly was. At the time these disciplines were concentrated in the fields of paintings & objects, being unknown to libraries & archives. I therefore concentrated my efforts on condition surveying to understand the problems & be able to put them into groups of similar materials, damage etc., also then for reasons of workflow, training for fundraising purposes, research & development of archival materials with various interested companies. Training my young staff, I started with group projects, such as tailored boxing & various phasing operations, a temporary wrapper I termed a phase box. One such early project was housing a large collection of delicate Persian binding covers, which had no text-blocks. For these I designed a box which could safely display the exterior face & could also be turned over to display the inner face; I called them flip-flop boxes. During this time I continued to develop my concepts of book conservation. The only way of training a genuine special collections book conservator is not by recipe or rote, but by teaching as wide a diversity of skills as possible, linked closely to historical and cultural awareness. In September 1979 I finally moved back to England to accept a position as the first Conservation Technical Officer to the Bodleian Library Oxford. There I continued my ideas on repairs to period binding while teaching

17 17 book preservation & conservation, including modern books & general binding problems. I would like to finish with the observation that from the position of the preservation of text there have proved to be two ideal structures the uncovered Ethiopian chain stitch binding protected by its leather case & the Oriental Ce or toji enclosed in their t ao or chitsu. Both structures are light in weight & both consist of two parts the book & the protective case. On the other hand the Europeans, from the birth of the codex in the late Roman period, combined the two parts. Over the years this has lead to a wide variety of interesting but complex binding constructions. The great majority of these lack a harmony between their component parts, causing stresses & strains leading to speedier breakdown. CC.L./Dam./Flor.Flood/Japan/03.doc Christopher Clarkson, 2003

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