Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Robert Clark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2008

This dramatic, beautifully written account of the flood that ravaged Florence, Italy, in 1966 weaves heartbreaking tales of the disaster and stories of the heroic global efforts to save the city’s treasures against the historic background of Florence’s glorious art.

On November 4, 1966, Florence, one of the world’s most historic cities and the repository of perhaps its greatest art, was struck by a monumental calamity. A low-pressure system had been stalled over Italy for six weeks and on the previous day it had begun to rain again. Nineteen inches fell in twenty-four hours, more than half of the annual total. By two o’clock in the morning twenty-thousand cubic feet of water per second was moving towards Florence. Soon manhole covers in Santa Croce were exploding into the air as jets of water began shooting out of the now overwhelmed sewer system. Cellars, vaults, and strong-rooms were filling with water. Night watchmen on the Ponte Vecchio alerted the bridge’s jewelers and goldsmiths to come quickly to rescue their wares. By then the water was moving at forty miles per hour at a height of twenty-four feet. At 7:26 a.m. all of Florence’s electric civic clocks came to a stop. The Piazza Santa Croce was under twenty-two feet of water. Beneath the surface, twelve feet of mud, sewage, debris, and oil sludge were starting to ooze and settle into the cellars and crypts and room after room above them. Six-hundred-thousand tons of it would smother, clot, and encrust the city. 
Dark Water brings the flood and its aftermath to life through the voices of witnesses past and present. Two young American artists wade heedlessly through the inundated city carrying their baby in order to witness its devastated beauty: the Ponte Vecchio buried in debris and Ghiberti’s panels from the doors of the Florence Baptistery, lying heaped in yard-deep mud; the swamped Uffizi Gallery; and, in the city libraries, one billion pages of Renaissance and antique books, soaked in mire. A Life magazine photographer, stowing away on an army helicopter, arrives to capture a drama that, he felt, “could only be told by Dante” amid the flooded tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo in Giotto and Vasari’s Santa Croce. A British student, one of thousands of “mud angels” who rushed to Florence to save its art, spends a month scraping mud and mold from Cimabue’s magnificent and neglected Crocifisso as intrigues and infighting among international art experts and connoisseurs swirl around him. And during the fortieth anniversary commemorations of 2006 the author asks himself why art matters so very much to us, and how beauty seems to somehow save the world even in the face of overwhelming disaster.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Arno River flood that deluged Florence, Italy, in 1966—killing 33 people and damaging 14,000 works of art and countless books and antiques—frames this meditation on the relationship between art and life. Clark (River of the West) embarks first on a leisurely history of Florence's intertwined experience of great floods and great art, through the perceptions of Dante, Leonardo, E.M. Forster and other writers and artists. The world's rapt concern for Florence's cultural treasures contrasts sharply with its neglect of the city's inhabitants, Clark argues, offering his impressionistic account of the 1966 disaster as seen through the eyes of artists, photographers, volunteer mud angels who swarmed the city to help rescue its waterlogged art and Communist militants who organized relief for poor neighborhoods. He then follows the decades-long and rancorously debated restoration projects, especially the controversial rehabilitation of Cimabue's 13th-century Crucifix, seeing in them a metaphor for artistic beauty as an endless work-in-progress. Clark's study is sometimes unfocused, but by building up layers of atmospheric chiaroscuro—the drying city, he notes, lay lacquered in tints of warm earth and azzuro sky... like pigments just brushed on and still moist—he achieves an evocative portrait of Florence as its own greatest masterpiece. (Oct. 7)
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From Booklist

Clark provides a unique twist on the horrific flood that ravaged Florence on November 4, 1966, killing 33 people, leaving countless numbers homeless, and damaging a huge number of priceless art treasures and rare books. Instead of merely recounting the devastation, he reaches back into the past, analyzing the historical dichotomy between Firenze, the city where natives live and work, and Florence, the art mecca students, scholars, and tourists flock to visit. Interweaving eyewitness accounts and experiences from those who lived through the deluge of 1966 and those who came to help with salvage and restoration projects, he paints a vivid portrait of a natural disaster with an array of sociological and cultural consequences. --Margaret Flanagan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076792648X
• ISBN-13: 978-0767926485
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #752,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Clark is the author of ten books, the novels In the Deep Midwinter, Mr. White's Confession, Love Among the Ruins, The Lives of the Artists, and Heaven (just published) as well as the non-fiction works The Solace of Food, River of the West, My Grandfather's House, Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces, and Bayham Street: Essays on Longing (coming in 2012). He is a winner of the Edgar for Best Novel, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Washington State Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction as well as being a finalist in the Los Angeles Times Book Awards and the IMPAC Dublin Award. He lives in Seattle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Particularly Enjoyable Read, November 11, 2008

By 

Robert E. Fitzpatrick "R. Fitz" (Campton, NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces (Hardcover)

In addition to skillfully selecting especially interesting and informative events and facts, Robert Clark writes beautifully! This book is a particularly enjoyable read and much more than a history of the 1966 flood. Dark Water reads like a combination of history, novel, adventure, and an essay of profound personal reflection. The subtitle, Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces, is apt.

This book is about much more than the 1966 disaster. In part, it even includes a look at Florence during WWII connecting the disparate artistic sensibilities of Mussolini, Hitler, and legendary art historians Bernard Berenson, and Frederick Hartt. To a greater extent, it relates a compelling, moment by moment, description of the flood with an emphasis on human interest--honestly, you'll feel like you're there. It introduces some of the complex issues of art restoration in ways that would make even my dog care about the subject. Finally, Dark Water is a very personal reflection. Clark introduces characters--the Arno itself becomes a living presence--who experience the flood firsthand, and he then weaves the common threads of their lives up to the present. He manages all of this by relating experiences; he is never didactic or pedantic.

I was so impressed by Dark Waters I went looking up all the reviews I could find to see if my opinion was shared. All the reviews are glowing, but none of them does the book justice (and my comments here are certainly inadequate). I would have been satisfied simply reading the facts and stories Clark relates. However, this was so much of joy to read that I found myself stopping and rereading portions just to savor his prose and his insight--for example, "But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps--in contemplating and tending those insults and injuries--that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist."

You will enjoy this.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Triumph Over Disaster, December 22, 2008

By 

John D. Cofield - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces (Hardcover)

When I was nine years old I saw pictures in the old Life magazine of a terrible flood that had just devastated an Italian city I had never heard of: Florence. Although I knew nothing of the masterpieces that had been damaged or destroyed, I realized that the world had suffered a great loss. Eight years later, as a teenager making my first trip to Europe, I visited Florence and saw the massive recovery and restoration efforts still underway. Florence meant more to me then, as I had just studied the Renaissance, and in the years since I have come to realize how important that rather small Italian city has been to the world's artistic, literary and spiritual development. Robert Clark's Dark Water is an excellent history of the city of Florence through the centuries, culminating with the 1966 flood and the subsequent recovery.

If Clark had only focused on 1966 and afterwards, this would still be an important work, but Dark Water is still more valuable because Clark has produced a fine history of the city, beginning with Dante, proceeding through the Renaissance, and on through to the present. He provides many excellent short biographies of the creative spirits associated with Florence, ranging from Leonardo and Michelangelo through to David Lees and Bernard Berenson. His accounts of Florence's participation in and witnessing of hundreds of years of history are also fascinating, particularly his coverage of the World War II period and the efforts made to preserve the city's treasures in the middle of massive conflict. His description of the 1966 flood and its aftermath is a gripping almost minute by minute account, and again features many hitherto unknown heroes of the recovery effort.

It would have been nice to have illustrations of the many artworks mentioned in this work and portraits of the many heroes and heroines who figure in Florence's history, and the book badly needs an index as well, but these are minor flaws, particularly when one considers Clark's fine writing style and his ability to create an engrossing narrative.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars May not be exactly what you think, December 27, 2008

By 

Adam (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces (Hardcover)

I think readers will mostly be split on this book, depending on your interests. Are you most interested in the history of some of the major artworks of Florence or most interested in the flood as an event in a dramatic setting?

What I was hoping and expecting from this book is a telling of the history of the flood and especially the art restoration that followed, with the thousands of volunteers from around the world. While the book does cover this, it doesn't get to the 1966 flood until about 120 pages into the book. Until then, the book briefly talks about the Arno here and there starting around the 1300s but mostly talks about art and artists in Florence over the centuries leading up to the flood. While it did give perhaps some useful background to some of the artworks that were the focus of the restoration after the flood, it rambled and meandered through the decades and centuries to the point that you begin to wonder if the book has been completely misrepresented.

I also found the writing style of the book to often be a bit too rich and melodramatic as if the author were trying a bit too hard to show that he could write in a creative way. Sometimes I felt that reading the book was a bit like listening to a person at a party telling an interesting story but in a self-indulgent way and where you wished they'd be a bit more focused and get on with it.

That said, I definitely found the sections dealing with WWII interesting as well as those sections actually about the flood and aftermath once he got to it. So my recommendation is that this should be an interesting book for you if you are generically interested in renaissance art and Florence and where the plot line of the flood just adds spice to the story. But if your interests are somewhat reversed and you are more interested in the drama of the flood and the unique response the world provided, and less interested in the 600 years of art in Florence prior to the flood, then I would agree with the other reviewer who recommends you consider skipping large chunks of the first 120 or so pages.