Florentines rescuing a painting, as David watches over the Piazza della Signoria.
Over the night of November 4th to 5th, 1966, Florence flooded. The river Arno rose as high as 6.7 meters (about 22 feet) in some places, over 100 people were killed, and many paintings and documents were destroyed by the floodwaters. Young people, arriving from across the Continent, immediately began showing up to help. They became known to the Florentines as ‘gli angeli del fango,’ or ‘the Mud Angels’. The Mud Angels were not recruited, and they were not organized, but over the winter they cleaned mud out of the Basilica di Santa Croce, carried priceless paintings out of the Uffizi galleries and brought food and fresh water to the elderly Florentines trapped in their upper-floor apartments.
