The mud angels

The library's oldest collections were kept in the basements of this building, and that is where the water reached first. More than a million books, newspapers and manuscripts ended up underwater, soaked through with mud and heating oil.

What happened next was something no one had planned. Young people from across Italy and beyond made their own way to Florence, slept in train carriages and cinemas, and formed human chains that passed buckets of mud outside and drenched volumes up to the light. A journalist called them the mud angels, and the name stuck.

The work was hard and filthy, and it went on for months. The wet books were taken to tobacco drying sheds and boiler rooms nearby, because nowhere had equipment for anything like this, and only as time passed did specialists work out how to dry paper and keep it whole.

The workshops that grew out of those years get their story told in our walk through Oltrarno.

Following the embankment west, we reach the oldest bridge in the city.