After the flood: Excerpts from "Dark Water"

In "Dark Water," author Robert Clark chronicles the devastating 1966 flood in Florence, Italy, that submerged thousands of Renaissance paintings and works of art. The flood also inundated the Biblioteca Nazionale, repository for much of Italy's history and literary heritage. In this excerpt, Clark describes the daunting cleanup task.

At the Biblioteca Nazionale, Emanuele Casamassima had help, almost a surplus of it ... a tremendous quantity of items had been removed and relocated, and were now being washed and dried. All told, there would be around 1 billion leaves or sheets of paper to deal with, and the question of what to do with them next seemed suddenly to arise: Should torn and fragmented pages be somehow mended and sutured? Should oil and mud stains be bleached out, cosmetically restored, or left untouched? Should some or all of the millions of volumes be rebound? How did you balance the utilitarian needs of future readers and scholars against the integrity of books and manuscripts as aesthetic and historical objects? Assuming time and money were not infinite, was it more important to have a continuous collection of every newspaper published in Italy during the nineteenth century or a letter in Machiavelli's own hand? Casamassima realized that he simply didn't know. Nor did he have much time to consider the matter: mold fed even more eagerly on paper than paint.

No one knew more about paper, printed texts, manuscripts, and binding than a small group of experts in London and Oxford, and what the Americans were to artworks, the British would be to books. On November 25, three weeks after the flood, Casamassima called his counterpart at the British Museum, who in turn contacted Peter Waters of the Royal College of Art. The next day Waters, accompanied by the restorer Anthony Cains, arrived in Florence and they were later joined by Christopher Clarkson of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. They found Casamassima at the Biblioteca cooking lunch for the angeli.

The British spent two days watching and listening. The makeshift operation Casamassima had improvised worked much better than the British might have expected: books were being covered with sawdust and interleaved with blotting paper, which was good, but also, to their horror, with colored mimeograph paper, whose pigments leached into the pages the interleaving was designed to protect. Nor was it sufficient to let the interleaving absorb the moisture and then leave it inside the book; once it had blotted up water, it had to be replaced with a dry sheet, sometimes up to a dozen times. Otherwise the interleaving itself would turn the book into a sodden brick of pulp, which mold would quickly begin to consume. Fortunately, the weather had remained cold: warmer conditions would have fostered an epidemic of spores. But many books might decompose with no assistance from mold: the extremely fine-grained mud of the Arno had not only coated the pages but worked its way between the very fibers of the paper, abrading the leaves from both inside and out. Other books, impregnated and brittle with glue from their bindings, might simply crumble.

On the Tuesday after their arrival, the British had a meeting with Casamassima. They outlined all the problems they'd observed and suggested solutions. But at the end of the meeting they proposed something more radical. The entire salvage program of the Biblioteca to date consisted of washing, drying, and wrapping books in paper to await action to be determined at some future date, regardless of their condition. This was no way to run a library, Waters diplomatically suggested, backed up by the rather more acerbic, chain-smoking Cains. Why not aim to restore and rebind every book that needed it? Set up a kind of production line in which each volume would be disassembled, washed, dried, photographed, wrapped in fungicide-treated paper, and sent on to whatever specialist treatment it needed — repair or rebinding — and then reshelved as quickly as possible. Money could be found. Angeli could be taught the necessary skills. Waters would agree to stay not for a week but ten months, and then Caines would take over for what would prove to be three years. To the surprise of the British, Casamassima accepted the entire plan. What was needed immediately was streamlining, organization and more technical know-how. In short order the British devised and improvised forty stainless-steel washing stations, a program to chemically inoculate books against mold, and a visually coded card system — many angeli, for all their enthusiasm, spoke neither English nor Italian — to track each item and the treatment it required. The least damaged volumes needed washing — it took about four hours per book — but others needed their mud scraped away with surgical blades, one page at a time. A large number had to have each leaf pried apart from the next, stuck together by the dissolved and redried glue from their bindings, the entire volume now an impregnable block.

Drying was as problematic as washing, given the absence of electricity and fuel ... the ceiling of the building extended up several stories and ropes had been stretched across the vault in rows and layers, each a few feet higher in altitude than the next, folios of paper draped over them like densely packed Neopolitan laundry. When David Lees came to photograph the angeli in the boilerhouse for Life, the book leaves looked like an enormous flock of doves descending. Once, a door was left open, a gust of wind entered, and the papers did exactly that, sailing through the air and falling by the thousand.

From "Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces" by Robert Clark. Thanks to Doubleday for permission to run this excerpt.