Florence apres le Deluge

From JOSEPH MACLEOD

FLORENCE

THE floods were last November; the response magnificent both within the city and without. Florence has been recovering ever since, so that though many scars may remain she will be ready for the tourists who come in the spring.

She has been helped by her own peculiar nature, and by the nature of her people. Thousands of Florentine lives were saved by Florentine architecture. Not only are the houses so solid that they withstood some fifty million cubic metres of water, mud and oil battering motor-cars against their walls like floating toys against the side of a bath : they are also built in the Scottish way, with a common stair. People could escape to higher floors as the dawn waters rose over lower ones.

Hundreds perhaps were saved by the Prefetto (a civil governor appointed by the government in Rome). He rang no tocsin to evacuate streets near the Arno when he received the alarm, be- cause it was the morning of a public holiday and the streets would be empty. No traffic jams blocked them, and only one man, I believe, was trapped in a car. If statistics can be trusted (and Italian statistics take account only of dead bodies brought in), the number of deaths from the flood was forty.

But the Florentine way of building went sadly against work and trade. The shopkeepers gener- ally keep their stocks in their cellars, many of which were filled with special goods left over from British Week and with seasonal supplies for Christmas. Out of 10,000 shops in the city, 6,000 were wrecked, most of them totally.

Those with large resources or branches else- where could reopen brightly as soon as they had been emptied, scoured and disinfected. Rich antiquarians cut their losses and replaced vanished treasures with reserves. In this sense, Florence is already the centre she was before. Almost at once smaller shops in every street, poor haberdashers or smart shoe-shops, cleaned, paired, washed, ironed alluvionati goods to sell cheap and get credit for new; then makeshift shelves displayed cartons and packages pitifully few and in unwonted confusion. This, too, has now changed.

Thousands of artisans kept their plant and tools on ground floors or even in basements. I don't mean only leather-workers or wood-carvers for the tourist trade. The word here covers most of the city's mechanical life: everything that can be is specialised—you take your car for repair to a mechanic, or expert in radiators or even carburettors, electrician, bodywork man, upholsterer. Most of these are self-employed, perhaps with an apprentice or two and paid assistants, who over the years had built up valu- able plant, much of which was destroyed, damaged or dragged away. Each of them was entitled to and able to claim (almost at once) the equivalent of £150—enough to replace a bench, spanners, cutting tools, smaller plant, some material. The rest was up to the hands and knowledge of the artisan, and most of them could have had no better capital. All wanted to get back to work rather than seek charity.

The category hardest hit was perhaps the medi- Joseph Macleod will be remembered by many of our readers as a BBC news-reader during the war. He has been living in Florence for the past ten years.

cal profession, which here includes general practitioners, consultants, surgeons, dentists, radiologists. Being, like lawyers, a liberal pro- fession, they were entitled to no aid whatsoever from any source, state, local government, or church. Fifteen had homes, consulting rooms, cars and instruments completely destroyed, forty- five others were gravely affected, another thirty less gravely. Doctors all over Italy donated one day's fees to their Florentine colleagues, but the fund soon went: a cheque for one such family from a professional club of medical ladies in South Wales was received by a Florentine GP with the same dignity of understanding as had inspired the gift; he replaced essential books.

We were lucky in our Lord Mayor, Piero Bargellini. Art expert and historian, he had just been elected, and his first drive had been for 'a clean Florence.' The army proved so inefficient during the one night it was responsible for order that he took back civil control next morning. Profiteering went down to a minimum after his threat to close down any offending shop for ever, and looting was negligible. When the home- less squatted in unfinished apartment buildings without windows or amenities, he accepted the move, and provided water, blankets, and so on. He trusted his people as Churchill trusted the British, and with much the same result: Florence trusted him.

Local government aid came wisely, widely and in the main speedily, though local funds could not reach all those who had no money for food after the first free issues and no immediate means of getting it. State loans are tied up with conditions and certificates hard to obtain. In the first days, a small band of residents wrote to friends and influential people in America and Britain. They were united under the British Consul, Christopher Pirie Gordon, in a typically British, amorphous, informal machinery for dis- tribution, having no brakes and needing no oil. Accountants lent by Superbox Limited ensured financial correctness and the impossibility of any recipient being paid twice by mistake. In the first two months the equivalent of some £40,000 from America and Britain reached 1,700 indi- viduals at a gross expense of .025 per cent— perhaps a world record. The Consul's personality, indeed, was such that no rifts, departmentalisms or national jealousies appeared for a moment. The Atlantic Charter seems prickly by contrast.

Looking back on the weeks of the Florence flood is like looking back on the years of the London blitz. The same silent determination (silence among this usually loquacious people), the same neighbourliness, the same wry humour (one shop on the second morning bore a notice 'Closed for the Holidays'), the same funny anec- dotes (one old woman, tipping small bucketfuls of mud from her wrecked home into the river, was overhead to mutter, 'A good thing we have the Arno'), and, of course, the flood-bore for the bomb-bore.

Florence is now rebuilding. Broken river banks and parapets are being replaced. The heroic public services restored water, light, drains and even road surfaces at incredible speed, though the work is still going on. Nothing will remove the streaks of muck and oil on most of the buildings, except time and perhaps not even that. There is still mud in many cellars, despite the fact that the army got most of it away with grabs, mechanical shovels and pumps and a good deal of welcome high spirits, and many streets still remain to be cleared in one or two areas. Many of the narrow ones have facades shored up by immense baulks, grouted into the roadway or bridging across to unsafe houses opposite. In one the inhabitants covered the timbers with green foliage and set a Christmas tree with coloured lights on top—a serene defiance, for their cellars were still unusable if not insanitary. At one time in another street mud pumped out by day flowed up again at night—the drainage system went back to Dante's time and there was no record or diagram.

But there are plans for these things, too, and Florence will see to herself locally. Naw she needs dry months, and patience. Inevitably there will be a time-lag before large-scale state aid matures, and meanwhile there are hardships even among those who are re-establishing themselves; basic sacrifices among the middle classes, suffer- ings among the aged, disabled, blind and hun- dreds who cannot yet resume the little ploys that enabled them to live on pitiful pensions.

The Florentines are reserved and will not speak of these things as they show tourists the flood- level in shops and bars and tell their own ex- periences. The catastrophe has been accepted. Little interest is taken in moves to find public scapegoats over dams in the hills, and Florence is working in preparation for the friends she trusts to arrive. By the spring she will be ready.