I started out for Florence in the morning in a state of feverish excitement, and the recollection of the sights of that day makes it difficult to write even now. We drove down the hill from San Casciano to the Greve valley with a sense of overwhelming tragedy. The destruction of Florence seemed the end of all civilization. How long would this situation last?

On August 11 the German forces defending the north bank of the Arno in the center of Florence withdrew to the periphery of the city, leaving the major part of the town in the hands of the Partisans but subject to sporadic shellfire. Only a few Allied officers and their enlisted assistants were permitted into the center of the city for the all-important purpose of bringing some quantities, however small, of food, water, and medicine to the stricken population. For nine days the inhabitants had been shut up in their houses, cut off from all public services by the blowing up of the water mains, the gas and the light, always the last graceful gesture of the Germans before leaving a city. By August 12 the suspense of waiting for an order to go to Florence had become unbearable, and I drove down to Eighth Army headquarters to try to cut the waiting short, only to find that on the preceding day Captain Ellis had already been to Florence. He had not crossed the river, however, nor had the still unsettled conditions on the south bank permitted him to do much exploring. He was able to report only that the principal monuments of the south bank, such as the Pitti Palace and the churches of Santo Spirito and the Carmine, were apparently intact, although the Masaccio frescoes in the latter were walled up and could not be seen. Ponte Santa Trinita, the finest bridge of the Renaissance and perhaps the most beautiful bridge in Italy, was definitely and completely gone (Figs. 1, 2). The design for this masterpiece of Bartolommeo Ammanati has been revealed by a recently discovered letter to have been corrected and reworked by Michelangelo himself.

But for me the necessity of getting in touch with the Superintendency to find out about the rest of the deposits was by this time absolute. I succeeded in obtaining from the Group Captain permission to visit the south bank of the Arno, for the sole purpose of going to the Palazzo Pitti to interview the chief personnel of the Superintendency. I was on no account to cross the river, as the military situation was still highly unsettled and the center of the city, held only by small bands of Partisans and those AMG officers essential for health and police purposes, might be retaken by the Germans at any moment.

I therefore started out for Florence the next morning in a state of feverish excitement, and the recollection of the sights of that day makes it difficult to write even now, two years later. I presented my pass to the Military Police at at San Casciano, not even noticing that the graceful town, one of the loveliest of the villages surrounding Florence, had been gutted by Allied air bombardments. We drove down the hill from San Casciano to the Greve valley with a sense of overwhelming tragedy. The destruction of Florence seemed the end of all civilization. How long would this situation last? Would Florence become another Cassino? Already that comparison was on the thoughtless lips of young staff officers unaware of its significance. How could they know if they had never seen Florence glitter in the valley through the cypresses of Bellosguardo; or looked from San Miniato at sunset to see the Arno under its bridges turn to copper, the cathedral standing ankle deep in rooftops, flanked in majesty by Giotto’s campanile and defended by the towers of the Bargello and Palazzo Vecchio; or if they had never walked in solemn amazement through the incomparable spatial harmonies of Santa Maria Novella and Santo Spirito?

We passed below the Certosa di Galuzzo, still undamaged on its hilltop, which I had last seen as a young student years before. At the road fork below Poggio Imperiale the direct road into Porta Romana, the great southern gate of the city, was closed by a simple sign with the words “Under Enemy Observation.” We turned right, up the slope of Poggio Imperiale and then down the tree-masked road to Porta Romana. Through the trees I caught a quick glimpse of that luminous spectacle of the city which no one who has ever seen it from the hills can possibly forget. The valley around reverberated with shellfire.

The people on the streets seemed to be emerging from some dreadful illness. They were drawn, pale, miserably thin from the long siege. I drove up to Villa Torreggiani, in whose gardens the temporary AMG headquarters had been set up for several days, penetrating with difficulty the hurly-burly of trucks, jeeps, officers, soldiers, and Italian civilians that filled the gardens. I was suddenly recognized by the provincial commissioner for AMG in Florence, the young British lieutenant colonel, Ralph Rolfe. He at once ordered me to cross the river into the northern part of the city. My previous orders could thus be disregarded. But first I was to write out passes for all the Superintendency personnel to cross the Arno. This was my first experience with the famous travel passes, the writing of which was to take up so much of my time in the ensuing months. It struck me as ludicrous that after fighting for nine days to get a pass to come to Florence myself, my first duty on arrival should be the writing of passes for twelve other people.

In the Torreggiani gardens I met for the first time one who was to become a faithful collaborator during the next year of hard work, Prof. Filippo Rossi, director of the galleries of Florence. After the complicated passes were completed and Franco and I had lunched on c-rations under a pine tree, we started through the crowded streets of Oltrarno for the Pitti Palace. From the shade of Via Serragli with its overhanging eaves we drove through crowds of liberated Florentines into the blazing sun of Piazza Pitti and up the slope to the mountainous façade of the palace. How many tourists from every country had once entered that gate and gazed up through the courtyard of Ammanati at the fountain playing against the sky, and to the cypresses and oleanders of the Boboli gardens! Now the vast court was a crawling mass of unfortunate humanity. The palace of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany looked like the most crowded slum in Naples. Mothers, babies, men, boys, with bundles of clothing and mattresses and a few miserable belongings, lay under the huge arches, swarmed through the courtyard and up the stairs, screamed from the palace windows. Sheets and clothing hung in quantities from every balcony. Here and there tables and even little charcoal stoves were set up for the preparation of pathetic meals. There was only one source of water in the palace, and there were six thousand refugees who had come to find shelter in these massive walls after the Germans had evacuated the whole section of the city along the river-banks. Even the royal apartments had been put to use to accommodate this tide of human misery, and the romantic walks of the Boboli Gardens were used as a public toilet. It was months before the gardeners got them clean again.

In a moment my jeep was surrounded by curious, joyful people. My future colleagues were about me, overflowing with questions. “We have been waiting for you so long!” cried Poggi’s son. “Why didn’t you come sooner?” I seemed to be borne bodily from the jeep by the wave of spontaneous affection and good will. I met dozens of people in quick succession, but particularly Prof. Ugo Procacci, one of the two directors of the Superintendency, responsible for the preservation of all works of art outside Florence in the three provinces, as well as for the famous Gabinetto del Restauro in the Uffizi, where, with slender material means, many a miracle is worked and many a masterpiece saved for posterity. In later months the self-sacrifice and devotion of Procacci and his all-consuming love of art were to increase my respect for him beyond description. And then appeared the superintendent himself, grave and self-contained, like a figure from a Masaccio fresco, whose true nobility was disclosed by the events of this terrible period.

I was soon extricated from the crowd and led to a conference table which had been prepared in one of the frescoed halls of the palace. At this meeting I outlined the administrative structure of MFAA, explained who we all were and in what ways we would be able to help the Superintendency, and also the limitations of the work possible under AMG. I then obtained from the Superintendency the full list of the still-occupied deposits and ascertained their location. Thus began a year of collaboration in which Allied officers and Italian officials faced together the disasters of a war which in a few months ruined so large a proportion of the monuments of Tuscan art.

This essay is taken from Florentine Art Under Fire. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image, uploaded by Rhododendrites, is a photograph of Florence from the Duomo terrace. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license., courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.