PRESERVATION FROM OUTSIDE DANGERS PART II THE FLORENCE, ITALY, DISASTER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73-00402R000100140005-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2006
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: August 5, 1969
• Content Type: PAPER

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WORLD CONFERENCE
ON RECORDS
AND GENEALOGICAL SEMINAR
Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A.
5-8 August 1969
Part II
The Florence, Italy, Disaster
By
"Record Protection in
an Uncertain World"
COPYRIGHT? 1969 7HE N ,~FFo rReleaseo2006c09c2 : CIA-RDP7o3-00402R000 100 40005-4A REA A - 12&13 b
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PRESERVATION FROM OUTSIDE DANGERS
Part II
The Florence, Italy, Disaster
By
John Hensel
I am sure all of you will agree that one of the most appalling natural disasters in modern
times occurred at Florence, Italy, late in 1966.
I was visiting Italy at the time of the Arno flood. The Italian press, radio and television
devoted virtually their entire news coverage to this event - very much as our news media in the
United States gave around-the-clock coverage to the assassination and funeral of President
John F. Kennedy three years earlier.
In the press throughout the world, the event was given impressive coverage - impressive
mostly from the standpoint of the damage to art treasures and to priceless paintings. While the
damage to documents was also covered, it did not receive the in-depth treatment which it
deserved.
The thought occurred to me that there were lessons to be learned from this desaster -
lessons not only for librarians, scholars, and teachers, but for men and women everywhere.
In that disaster, many documents representing an important part of our human heritage
were lost and. can never be replaced. While the loss of the original books and manuscripts might
not have been prevented by microfilming, at least it would have enabled us to preserve the
information in the documents.
I should mention here that a long step forward has been taken with the announcement, in
Rome last March, of a massive project to microfilm all Italian works of art within Italy, as well
as those in other countries owned by the Italian government. This project is the first instance
in which a nation has set out to take an exhaustive inventory of its cultural heritage and
establish an automatically retrievable listing of its works of art.
I shall discuss the new Italian program in greater detail a bit later. But if it had been well
advanced three years ago, there would not, perhaps, have been a need for me to prepare this
special report on the damage to priceless original documentary materials in Florence.
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As an introduction to this report, I would first like to show a short film. This motion
picture footage consists of clips from newsreels which were taken at the outset of the flood.
(LIGHTS OUT - SCREEN 3 MINUTES OF 16mm NEWSREEL FOOTAGE)
(Film clips will be matched to action described
in the narration).
The people.of Florence will not soon forget .
November 5th, 1966, a day that will be black in
the minds of Florentines for centuries to come.
For it was the day that the beautiful
art-rich Italian :city was mercilessly ravaged by
the rampaging Arno River.
The rain-swollen Arno, normally nothing
more than a stream, rose swiftly in the night.
It crested its steep banks at daybreak and
gushed into the narrow streets of the old
Renaissance city, into the cellars, into churches
and libraries treasured by the world - tossing cars
about like toys and leaving tons of oil-slick mud
in its wake. In a matter of several hours,, a
heritage that took centuries to acquire was
severely damaged - an . important part of it
irretrievably so.
Damage in dollars was estimated in tens of,
millions.
Thousands had to live without water and
food for days and were without homes for
weeks.
Hundreds of artisans, Florence's economic
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backbone, were wiped out.
But the River caused more than economic
harm.
In the art galleries, the museums and
especially the libraries, it bruised Florence's very
soul - her history - of which she and the world
are most proud.
In all, some 1,200 paintings on wood and
canvas were badly damaged by the water, mud
and oil.
And seemingly infinite was the number of
documents, manuscripts and books - some
themselves containing valuable art - that were
turned into soggy, muddy, oily pulp.
Between four and five million books and
manuscripts were ruined. Hundreds of students
and soldiers took more than a month to remove
them from the bowels of a score of libraries. The
tedious work of restoration began and in many
cases the mud and scum had to be scraped by
knife from the parchment pages.
(END OF FILM - LIGHTS UP)
The hardest hit were the National Library and the State Archives, located several hundred
yards apart on the Arno's east bank. At the National Library, Italy's second largest, the toll
was overwhelming: 100,000 volumes from the Medici and Palatine collections; 45,000 18th
Century books; 70,000 modern works; 40,000 theses and thousands of manifests - all
waterlogged. It was hoped that 80 per cent of the material could be recovered. The rest was
written off as lost.
Fortunately, the rare documents section, the only microfilmed section of the library, was
not touched. At the State Archives, as at the other libraries, the muddy waters poured into the
basement of the buildings, which also houses the Uffizi Art Gallery. Some 40 of the library's
250 rooms were .flooded by up to six feet of water that inundated 50,000 volumes - many of
them hand-written on parchment centuries ago - and hundreds of thousands of documents.
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"We had no warning at all," Professor Sergio Camerani, director of the State Archives
said. "The custodians had time only to save their lives." None of the highly valuable
documents, such as the papers of Niccole Machiavelli and Dante Alighieri, were touched. But
to Camerani, and scholars the world over, everything in the Library was valuable. "A book by
its very nature is invaluable," said Camerani. "The older they are, the more invaluable they
become and many of those that were ruined date back to the 12th Century."
Realizing the truth of Camerani's words, hundreds of Italian and American students
rushed to help rescue Florence's books. History Professor Michael Pulman of Florida State
University's Florence Study Center, had 125 FSU students on the job the day after the
flooding. Some 80 students from Stanford University's Florence Center worked with the
Floridians, as did many other Americans.
I would now like to show for you some colored slides of this part of the operation which
was most interesting.
(LIGHTS OUT FOR 35mm COLOR SLIDES)
SLIDE 1 Here two students examine several of 250,000 books damaged at the Viessieux
Library in Palazzo Strozzi. The Library's books, all of them by modern (19th and
20th Century) American, English, French and German authors, were covered with
sawdust and laid out on the upper floors of the Strozzi to dry.
SLIDE 2 These students are sprinkling moisture-absorbing sawdust on books at Viessieux
Library. Later, pieces of Japanese paper were inserted between the wet pages to
further dry the books.
SLIDE 3 Viessieux Library Director, Professor Alessandro Bonsanti inspects waterlogged
books and documents piled on stairs at Palazzo Strozzi. The books were later
carted away to warehouses to be dried out.
SLIDE 4 Professor Sergio Camerani, Director of the State Archives in Florence's Uffizi
Gallery, watches a student inserting Japanese paper between the pages of one of
the 50,000 volumes in the library that were damaged by the floods. Man with
glasses and blue smock is Giorgio La Pira, former Mayor of Florence.
SLIDE 5 Students insert Japanese paper between pages at State Archives, where millions of
documents were also damaged.
SLIDE 6 This is a closeup of a 12th Century ledger from the Monastery of Santa Maria
Novella, one of the older books in the State Archives.
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SLIDE 7 Another 12th Century work, containing the stem of Florence on its cover, that
was damaged at the State Archives.
SLIDE 8 Professor Carrerani, UPI's Lotito, and custodian look down into one of the 40
rooms that were flooded at the State Archives. There are a total of 250 rooms in
the Archives in all.
SLIDE 9 This is what the three men saw when they looked down - a gaping hole in the
floor over the basement created by raging flood waters.
SLIDE 10 Worker pinpoints the level Arno River's floodwaters reached on the first floor of
the State Archives. The basement was completely flooded.
SLIDE 11 Italian and American students work on restoration of damaged books. They are
sitting and eating on sacks of sawdust.
(END OF SLIDES - LIGHTS UP)
Alice Reid, a fine arts graduate from Rochester, N.Y., was quoted as summing up the
student feeling. "I'm going to need some of these books," she said. "If they are lost, there is
no way of replacing them." Like the others, she was first called on to wade into library
basements to seek books beneath mud. Later, she was involved with the task of inserting dry
sheets of paper between soggy pages in an effort to dry them out. "Take this book," she said
of one she was working on in the State Archives. "It's just a 13th Century financial ledger
from the Monastery of Santa Maria Novella, but it is important to art students like me. Books
like this record prices monks paid for art works, and they are invaluable to the study and
authentication of art."
Miss Reid then added what I told many times in the days following the disaster: "It's a
shame they didn't microfilm.this material."
There had been some microfilming at the State Archives. The photography began there
about eight years ago. Only 12 per cent of the library's contents had been filmed and the steel
cabinets containing it were located safely on the second floor. The situation was worse at the
National Library, where the only microfilmed works were those in the rare documents section.
Other items were microfilmed only on the request of scholars willing to pay the bill. There, as
elsewhere, after the flood officials were trying to determine who had microfilmed copies of
books and manuscripts that were irretrievable.
Directors of the Cherubini Musical Academy hoped to recover the contents of much that
was destroyed from Vincent Duckles, University of California music professor who spent a
year there and microfilmed thousands of musical pieces. Lost at the Cherubini were a majority
of the Italian composer's original works and 15th , 16th and 17th Century musical
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manuscripts.
In most cases, the absence of microfilming was due to a shortage of funds and not to a
lack of interest in the process. "It's a matter of means." said Professor Eugenia Levi,
conservator of rare manuscripts at the State-controlled National Library. "We had a minimum
amount of money for our microfilming program. We had hoped to get more."
The same general comment was made by National Library Director Emanuele
Casamassima and State Archives Director Camerani. Even Allessandro Bonsanti, director of the
modern collection, Anglo-Saxon Viessieux Library in Palazzo Strozzi, was disturbed about the
lack of microfilming. No ancient, hand-inscribed parchment was lost at the Viessieux, but
some 250,000 volumes soaked up water and oil. Bonsanti estimated 30 per cent of the books
were not restorable. He was more concerned by the loss of rare first editions, among them
some 15 of Henry James' work, than with the loss of words.
"The words exist elsewhere," he said. "We can get them back, but not the rare editions.
We should have microfilmed them anyway," he added. "But we didn't, and that is worse."
Like the others, Bonsanti paused only briefly to discuss what should have been done. He was
more concerned with what had to be done to save the millions of imperiled books, documents
and manuscripts.
The enormity of the job that lay ahead was sized up by Benedictine Monk Mario Pinzuti,
an expert in book restoration and one of the first to arrive in Florence after flood waters
subsided. "It will take 15 years to restore the damage to books." he said. "And if we are lucky
we will be able to rescue 80 per cent of the works. No one has ever had to face any recovery
operation of this magnitude," he added.
The task of restorers like Father Pinzuti was made doubly difficult by the presence of oil,
washed out of basement heating units and cars, in the waters that damaged books. "The oil is
especially difficult to clean away," he said. "If they were just water-damaged our task would
be much simpler."
But there were other problems - among them "serious errors" made by well-meaning
persons in their rush to save the documents. The "mistakes" consisted of putting talcum
powder on waterlogged books without first inserting dry sheets of paper between the wet
pages, and in placing some documents - especially those made of parchment - in the wrong
places to dry. No one can be blamed for the errors because of the chaos that existed in the
libraries and in all of Florence the day after the flooding.
Students waded chest-deep in water, grabbing floating books. They dug for books buried
under mud and cleaned them off with their hands and on their own shirts and pants. Few
materials were available to dry the books, and in some cases talcum was used.
"The talcum caused books to become as hard as blocks of cement." said Father Pinzuti,
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head of book restoration at the Monte Oliveto Monastery near Siena. "Some of them are
impossible to pry, apart. There is only one way to begin restoration and that is to insert
Japanese paper between the pages of wet books to dry them out."
The inserting job was laborious and time-consuming and there were never enought hands
to do it.
With the works which had been recorded on the parchment, the mistake was putting
them in very hot places - such as tobacco drying warehouses - causing them to turn into what
Father Pinzuti described as "baked bricks." he explained, "Parchment absorbs much more
water than paper. If it is dried in dry, hot places, it shrivels up never to regain its shape again.
There is only one way to dry it and that is in a natural environment."
Despite the problems, the teams of restorers were determined to do their best. The
procedure they followed was generally the same as that being used by Greek-Catholic monks at
the San Nilo Abbey south of Rome in the Alban Hills. There, books were dried out in a room
equipped with a huge dehumidifier that literally pulled the moisture from their pages. The
monks then stripped the bindings, washed each page with water and fine paint brushes and
hung them to dry on clotheslines. Some of the books that were sealed tight were coaxed loose
with injections of a formaldehyde solution.
When the pages dried, they were laid one on top of the other and placed beneath large
presses to iron them out. Because of the large number of books to treat, the monks stopped
their immediate intervention there to return to thousands of other stained pages awaiting their
attention. Later, they would have to do the actual restoration - grafting paper into torn pages,
mending covers, rebinding the books and, lastly, "gassing" them to kill paper-destroying
micro-organisms.
The big question mark, according to Father Pinzuti, was how ink would hold up to the
washing. "It is pretty safe to say that the ink - especially the colored paintings on manuscripts -
will lose 25 per cent of its clarity. What will happen to the ink over the long run we just don't
know."
Because of the threat of fading and the unpredictable reaction of ink, the librarians were
hoping for a stepped-up program of microfilming. "But there are other things that will have to
be done first - namely, saving the books." said Bonsanti. "Microfilming is important, but it is a
matter of funds."
From the earliest days of photography, men who saw its possibilities for historical
purposes predicted the day when our library collections would contain film as well as paper.
While some progress has been made in this direction, the lessons learned at Florence indicate it
is not enough.
Which leads me now, directly, to the new Italian art microfilmin.g project...
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It is huge, encompassing hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures produced over
20 centuries - plus archaeological sites, historical centers and buildings of artistic interest.
The head of the government agency charged with overseeing Italy's artistic and cultural
treasures is Professor Bruno Molajoli. He made this statement last March: "The ability to
duplicate the microfilmed files easily means that universities, foundations and museums
throughout the world will be able to maintain their own microfilm files of any portion of the
vast Italian cultural heritage - an invaluable assist to artistic research" Unquote....
I am proud to say that my company has been selected to supply the microfilm materials
and equipment to be used in this, the first project of its kind to be organized on a truly
nationwide basis.
The first three microfilm centers are being installed this year in Rome, Florence, and
Bologna. Next year, six other cities will receive the necessary equipment to begin microfilming
the works of art in their respective areas.
When completed - in 20 years or longer, according to Professor Molajoli - the microfilmed
files will enable accurate restorations to be made of art works that have, in the course of time,
begun to deteriorate, or that have been damaged by floods or fire. The files will also provide a
permanent identification in case of theft or loss.
I now want to show a few color slides to give some idea of the type and quality of the
artistic materials involved in the new Italian project. (Note: slides are yet to be selected of the
some 60 just received from Milan.)
The project, enormous as it is, reveals several important, indeed glaring, omissions. NOT
included in the definition of "art" are music and literature. What of Palestrina, Vivaldi, the
Scarlattis, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini? What of Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pirandello,
D'Annunzio? There are only two major areas not included.
But there had to be a beginning somewhere - and a tremendously important beginning has
been made.
I am, of course, speaking about the future. I am sure that many of you here have been
using, microfilm for years. Let's face it - it is not any longer a new technology, basically. It has
come of age in the last five years or so, but most of you have been using it, one way or
another, much longer than that.
The question is - are you exploiting, to the fullest, its modern implications? Are you
exploiting the new possibilities now available in this rapidly developing technology?
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Are you thinking only, or even primarily, of gaining space in your physical environments
for new materials? Are you thinking also of security - of preserving copies of old, decaying
original documents? If so, these are reasons enough to consider and use microfilm.
But are you also thinking - as Professor Molajoli is thinking - of making your research
materials available to others? -whether these original materials are stored in St. Louis or Rome
or Mexico City or Tokyo or London or Salt Lake City or Paris or Boston or Vienna - or in any
of the thousands of collections, public and private, all of them constantly growing, in all parts
of the civilized world?
Are you perhaps thinking, as I am, of a WORLD POOL of research historical material,
instantly accessible to anyone in any major city anywhere? And even readily made
inexpensively available to the small schools and libraries of the rural countryside? And are you,
hopefully, thinking of the generations to come after we have gone?
Microfilming for space-saving and security purposes is an obvious benefit - indeed, it is the
most obvious benefit from the standpoint of most of us in this room. But I am referring not
only to those concerned with the collecting, housing and preservation of valuable books, art
works, documents and paperwork of any kind.
I am referring also to what microfilming can do for our young people today and for
posterity. Not only to preserve microfilmed reproductions of valuable materials but also to
make them available to students everywhere and at little cost - to make them available now
and in the future, when our young people (and their young people later on) will need them.
Perhaps we should all look once again to the sources of our culture and our heritage, and
we should make known to the custodians of these collections - to you people here today - the
benefits of modern day microfilm techniques.
Perhaps the lesson learned at Florence is that, through closer cooperation between people
like you - the guardians of irreplaceable original materials - and poeple like us - the members of
the microfilm industry - perhaps the lesson of Florence is that through such cooperation there
need never again be another disaster of this kind.
Thank you for your kind attention.
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