Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale: The Flood and the Mud Angels

Why is it significant?

Facing the little Piazza dei Cavalleggeri, just back from the river, stands a monumental building of pale stone with a tall tower at one corner. It was built between 1911 and 1935, and the tower is not for bells: it holds books.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Facing the little Piazza dei Cavalleggeri, just back from the river, stands a monumental building of pale stone with a tall tower at one corner. It was built between 1911 and 1935, and the tower is not for bells: it holds books.

This is the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the National Central Library, one of the two great national libraries of Italy. It began with one man, Antonio Magliabechi, librarian to the Grand Duke, who left his enormous private collection to the city when he died in 1714. Contemporaries described a man who lived and slept among towers of books and cared about nothing else. His gift opened to the public in 1747, and today the library receives a copy of what is published in Italy and keeps treasures such as Galileo's manuscripts.

On the 4th of November 1966, after days of rain, the Arno broke its banks. The Santa Croce quarter, the lowest part of the city, was hit hardest, and the library's basements and lower floors filled with water, mud and heating oil. More than a million items were damaged: newspapers, periodicals, rare books, catalogues. Across Florence dozens of people died, and in the basilica next door Cimabue's great painted crucifix was ruined.

Then something extraordinary happened. Young people poured into Florence from all over Italy and from abroad, students, hikers, strangers, and formed long human chains, passing dripping volumes hand to hand up out of the mud. Florentines called them gli angeli del fango, the mud angels. Books were dried wherever there was space and heat, even in tobacco-drying kilns in the countryside. Franco Zeffirelli made a documentary about the disaster, narrated by Richard Burton, that raised money around the world, and the work of restoration went on for decades, helping to create modern book conservation.

Here, more than anywhere, you can feel that literature is not only words but paper, and paper can drown. From the library, walk west along Corso dei Tintori, the old street of the cloth dyers, to the corner of Via de' Benci and a perfect little Renaissance palace.