Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in Florence--The City of Masterpieces by Robert Clark

Author:Robert Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 0767926498
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

At eight o’clock on the morning of November 8, the Casa del Popolo of Santa Croce officially opened as the de facto relief center of the quartiere. Food tables were set up on the right, clothing tables on the left, and an infirmary at the back. It should have been easy by then for the residents of the neighborhood to make their way there: the city had said that six hundred men would be out with shovels to clear the streets. But thus far perhaps a tenth of that number had turned up in Santa Croce. Butter, cheese, fruit, pasta, and meat had been promised, but only bread and milk appeared. Elsewhere in the city, it was said, cafés were already serving cappuccinos and croissants. Perhaps just as vexing to the Marxists of the Casa (who would have preferred that all the blame go to Bargellini and the Christian Demo-crats and their capitalist masters) was the report that the Seventh Day Adventists were distributing free copies of the Book of Revelation, St. John’s Apocalypse, as the key to everything that had befallen the city and the quartiere.

Santa Croce, or at least the Casa, had had enough. The people took to the streets. Paolo and Menzella got a loudspeaker and a crowd gathered, urged on by the plea “What’s there to lose?—the only thing you have is mud and water!” At 2:30, some two hundred persons marched on the Palazzo Vecchio, “united,” the Casa assured, “not by ideology, but common misfortune.” They were going to see the mayor and they wouldn’t leave until he’d talked to them. Bargellini’s deputy finally agreed that three delegates from the marchers could come in, which Paolo negotiated up to five.

The mayor met them seated in an antechamber and asked them what they wanted. They wanted to know, Paolo replied, how things really stood; they wanted to know why Bargellini kept saying that Florence had met the flood with a smile on the lips, that its citizens were heroic, and that the city was now already on its way to recovery. That, Bargellini responded, had been said in the interests of morale; people needed hope, did they not? But how, he asked again, could he help them?

To start, they wanted the streets cleared. They wanted basements pumped out. They wanted the whole quarter treated with disinfectants. They wanted all the supplies they’d requested—food, clothing, tools, and medicine—and they wanted official recognition of the Casa. Bargellini tried, by his lights, to be kind and good-humored. But according to Paolo, Bargellini hedged and chuckled and then slipped away, having only agreed that his deputy would accompany the demonstrators back to Santa Croce for an inspection.

When they got to the Piazza Santa Croce, there were indeed some of the workers promised, a bedraggled squad that had been furnished with spades too small to penetrate the mud effectively (although by now some five thousand shovels had reportedly been delivered to the city); and even if they’d had the right tools, they looked too exhausted to lift them.

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