Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (59 page)

Deane Keller entered the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa on September 3, 1944, to discover the Camposanto (upper photo, far right) without its roof. Within days, experts from Florence arrived in Pisa to gather the shattered fragments that fire and sun had baked off the walls. [Both photos: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD]

Monuments officer Captain Deane Keller visited the Florentine repository at Montegufoni during the winter of 1944/45. The paintings found by Fred Hartt in early August 1944, including Botticelli’s masterpiece,
Primavera,
were still there. [Deane Keller Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University]

The
Primavera
was but one of 246 paintings at Montegufoni, including an early thirteenth-century Pisa school crucifix (foreground), today in the Uffizi Gallery. The fourth work (from left to right) was painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1493. It, along with the early fourteenth-century crucifix to the right, today hangs in Florence’s Accademia, around the corner from Michelangelo’s sculpture of
David
. [Pennoyer Papers, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University]

On February 16, 1945, Fred Hartt, standing next to
Lucky 13,
watched as Deane Keller and local workers maneuvered the statue of Cosimo I de’Medici and his horse, by Giambologna, back into position in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. [Deane Keller Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University]

Shortly before Christmas 1944, Don Anelli—“the flying priest”—departed Rome, after a month of meetings at the Vatican, aboard this American C-47 transport plane arranged by OSS Captain Alessandro Cagiati. Don Anelli is standing on the far right, wearing a helmet and the parachute he used to return to his parish in northern Italy. [Sergio Giliotti Collection]

Open-top trucks loaded with some of the Florentine treasures, including this painting from the Uffizi—Luca Signorelli’s
Crucifixion
—began arriving in the northern Italian town of San Leonardo on August 13, 1944. German soldiers transported the uncrated paintings over hundreds of miles of poor-quality roads with little more protection than straw. [National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD]

Filippo Rossi, Director of the Galleries of Florence, arrived in San Leonardo and, to his relief, found both of the stolen paintings by Lucas Cranach—
Adam
and
Eve
(pictured here)—in good condition. [Frederick Hartt Papers, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gallery Archives]

Fred Hartt reached Campo Tures on May 13, 1945. The following day, Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins (far right) arrived to begin his interrogations of SS Colonel Alexander Langsdorff (center right) and Captain Schmidt (center left). [Frederick Hartt Papers, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gallery Archives]

The triumphant return of the Florentine treasures took place on July 22, 1945. This truck first passed before the review stand under the Loggia di Lanza. Then it stopped in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, where, seven years earlier, thousands of Florentines had greeted the arrival of German leader Adolf Hitler. [National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD]

In 1942, Florentine officials, concerned about Allied bombing, entombed Michelangelo’s sculpture
David,
and his other works, known as
The Slaves,
in brick. Three years later, Deane Keller and Charley Bernholz visited the Accademia to watch workmen completing the removals. Keller himself chiseled away a piece of the brick that protected
The Slaves.