The Rape of Europa (49 page)

But the next day was not an ordinary one. It was July 20, 1944, the day of the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life. Kesselring, whom Allied propaganda broadcasts had frequently suggested was not a strong Hitler supporter, and who had indeed often disagreed with the Führer, could not now afford to be seen as sympathetic to negotiations with the Allies or to be relaxing the defense of Italy. But even at this juncture the Allies, military and press alike, were sure that the Germans would leave Florence as quickly as they had Rome.

This confidence was not shared by those in the city. The German consul had been shocked to see a map showing plans for a large demolition area covering the central Florentine bridges, including the beautiful Santa Trinità (said to have been designed by Michelangelo) and the banks on either side. Only the Ponte Vecchio, Hitler’s favorite, was to be spared. The consul protested to Ambassador Rahn, as did his Swiss and Romanian colleagues. They were told that the demolition “depended on the behavior of the Allies.”

The latter, meanwhile, had made a public relations error of major proportions. On the morning of July 29 General Alexander had broadcast a message to the Florentines exhorting them to defend their city’s utilities, prevent the enemy from exploding mines, and protect rail communications. Most of these instructions were already moot, the Germans having destroyed these facilities some days before, and the only effect was to endanger anyone walking about. The message ended with the fatal statement that “it is vital for Allied troops to cross Florence without delay in order to complete the destruction of German forces on their retreat northwards.”
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In case everyone had not heard the broadcast, the message was printed on leaflets and showered over the city.

During the next two days the Germans evacuated some fifty thousand citizens from the bridge areas. On August 3 the populace was ordered to close itself inside and stay away from the windows. At about ten that night Bernard Berenson, watching from his secret hiding place outside Florence, and unaware that a considerable portion of his own collection had just been destroyed, saw “a Neronian spectacle of a huge fire … a great explosion burst from the heart of Florence: it threw up a serpentine jet of smoke that reached the sky.”
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At the Pitti, glass rained down on displaced householders camping in the courtyard. It took three tries to destroy the beloved bridge of Santa Trinità. The next morning British troops entered the southern sections of the city. As in the case of Monte Cassino, controversy as to who was to blame for these events went on for years. Suffice it
to say that it was a logical military act for Kesselring, surely approved by Hitler, to delay his enemy’s advance, and indeed the Allies did not gain control of the north bank of the Arno for almost two more weeks.

Dr. Fasola
(center, with glasses)
and colleagues retrieving works from Montegufoni

With Florence in the center of the battle zone, museum officials had little idea of what had happened to their works of art. Inspection of the
ricoveri
was dangerous, but on July 20, Professor Cesare Fasola, librarian of the Uffizi, bravely set off on foot toward the front lines to check the depositories. Arriving at the Villa Bossi-Pucci at Montagnana, Fasola was amazed to find it already deserted and nearly empty: “The doors and windows were wide open and wrenched off their hinges. … I entered through an indescribable state of disorder only to find that an almost total clearance had been effected … there still remained a few priceless pictures: Perugino’s
Crucifixion
lying on the ground in the midst of rubbish and debris….” The library books had all been thrown down and trampled upon.

In the twilight Fasola walked on to Montegufoni, a villa owned by the eccentric Sitwell family, where he found comparable disorder and filth. The cases of the pictures had all been opened and moved, some “piled up in a dark corridor where a fetid smell left no doubt as to the use that had
been made of this passage,” but few seemed to have been taken. According to the caretakers, the disorder had been caused by the front-line parachutists and SS troops who still held it. The chaos and danger to the collections was increased by nomadic groups of refugees who constantly passed through. For days Fasola acted as a one-man police force, begging and pleading for his pictures with the troops:

The best thing to do was to try to be present everywhere. Whenever soldiers appeared I went and met them, I greeted them, I talked to them, and I accompanied them on their visit to the Castle, as if it were a Museum. Sometimes I managed to lead them right to the other end of the building and to show them out. What a relief! In the meantime I tried to explain to them that it was a question of important works, admired by the Führer.
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After a dramatic night in the cellars (“The rattling of the machine guns draws near, it becomes lacerating and crashes against the doors of our shelter”) the Germans were replaced by New Zealanders, and Fasola’s educational measures were begun anew. Soon after came the press; “Great was their surprise and equally great their joy when they found themselves face to face with our masterpieces,” he later wrote. This was quite an understatement. Two British reporters, Vaughn Thomas and Erik Linklater, had entered the castle to interview Indian troops and indeed come face to face with Botticelli’s
Primavera.
Looking around they saw more and more familiar pictures, among them such greats as the
Rucellai Madonna.
All were unboxed and surrounded by soldiers making tea. Outside, less than half a mile away, they could see a line of German tanks, their guns aiming at the villa.
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The four Allied Monuments officers assigned to Florence, waiting impatiently behind the lines near Lake Trasimeno for the liberation of the city, heard this news on the morning BBC broadcast. First Lieutenant Frederick Hartt immediately set off in another of the few and legendary Monuments jeeps, which had begun its career in North Africa and gone on through Sicily and Sardinia. Skirting ruined towns and frequently blocked by artillery activity, Hartt took all day to make the ninety-mile trip north.

The next morning, with shells still screaming by, he inspected the many rooms of stacked pictures at Montegufoni, now carefully guarded by the Indian regiment. Most were unharmed, but some, such as Ghirlandaio’s
Adoration of the Magi
, which Fasola had discovered being used as a table by the Germans, had suffered considerably. The sight of Montagnana and
other refuges still under fire brought home the enormous potential losses. Skipping the normal channels, Hartt asked BBC-man Thomas to take a message directly to the Eighth Army commander and ask for extra guards for these and future deposits. The discovery of the
ricoveri
had caused such excitement that General Alexander himself, the Supreme Commander for Italy, came to visit the scene on August 3, to the immense gratification of Professor Fasola, to whom he seemed a “Homeric hero.”

Hartt, now assisted by various colleagues grouped at Montegufoni, spent the next days driving and climbing to the other
ricoveri
to check their contents and post guards where he could. There was no question of moving anything in this constantly shifting battlefield, especially as Florence itself was not secured. Hartt and Langsdorff must have been nearly in sight of one another on more than one occasion as the extraordinary minuet of the masterpieces proceeded. For the Allied Monuments officers, encounters with great works in strange places were often overwhelming. Opening a storeroom which had also been used by the Germans as a garage at Torre a Cona, Hartt saw “in the sudden sunlight which streamed through the outer doors … the colossal statues by Donatello and Michelangelo … still in their protecting crates. Unable to suppress an exclamation of shock and wonder I climbed over the crates, identifying with great emotion one after another until I found myself gazing through the bars of a crate into the agonized face of Michelangelo’s
Dawn
, every tragic lineament disclosed by the light from the door.”
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Although Allied troops arrived in the southern section of Florence on August 4, they could not move into the center until after the eleventh, when the Germans withdrew from the river. The northern parts of town remained in German control until the third week of August. In the meantime, life on both sides of the river was miserable. The Pitti and the Boboli Gardens had become a great refugee center where six thousand citizens evacuated before the bridge demolition were living in terrible squalor.

When Hartt first entered the courtyard of the Pitti on August 13 he was greeted with jubilation and relief by the two top Florentine art officials, Drs. Poggi and Procacci, who related the recent events with great emotion. They went immediately to the river. Huge piles of rubble lay along the banks, but it was still possible to cross the Ponte Vecchio. The ruins were filled with mines, and raw sewage spewed out over the devastation. Herbert Matthews of
The New York Times
reported that “Florence as the world knew it is no more,” and although the great monuments remained intact, “it will not be the Florence of the Medici, it will not be that perfection, that utterly harmonious atmosphere that made it unique in the world.”
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At the Uffizi all the windows and skylights were gone and decorative frescoes
hung down from the walls. Someone had written in chalk below the statue of Dante in the colonnade of the empty Uffizi:

In sul passo dell’ Arno
I tedeschi hanno lasciato
Il ricordo della loro civiltà
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(In the crossing of the Arno/The Germans have left/A souvenir of their good manners).

Allied control was not total until late August. This was sometimes a mixed blessing, as the problems of Military Government already encountered in Sicily and Naples began to recur. Lieutenant Hartt was relentlessly pursued by villa owners trying to have their houses declared
“monumenti nazionali”
and thereby avoid billeting of troops, and by homeless refugees who confused him with the displaced persons officer Lieutenant Dart. Army units schemed to be allowed to set up in the Pitti Palace, and repair estimates and proposals by the hundreds arrived to be pushed through the various bureaucracies.

There were more frivolous requests: one Florentine count, immaculately attired in “a white linen suit, a blue shirt and a boutonnière,”
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came to discuss the reopening of the race track in the Cascine. Despite these irritations the Monuments officers found plenty of volunteers who patrolled the city each morning and picked up fragments of sculpture and architecture knocked off by the night’s shelling, and others who spent their days diving into the now filthy Arno to retrieve what remained of the adornments of the Ponte Santa Trinità. (All but the head of the statue of
Spring
were recovered, and that suddenly appeared on a sandbank three hundred yards downstream in 1961.)

Hardest of all was the need to deal with officers totally oblivious to historic preservation. Hartt could not persuade Army engineers to stop bulldozing away salvageable fragments of the ancient buildings blown up by the Nazis, along with the books, manuscripts, and works of art which had been inside. Happier was quite another engineering feat undertaken to return the statue of Cosimo I to the city. The oxcart in which he had departed was replaced by a ten-ton wrecker from the 477th Ordinance Evacuation Company, and the separated horse and rider were loaded in short order by an Italo-American team directed by Deane Keller. A soldier rode on the horse to lift or cut power lines. As the truck approached Florence, people in small villages cheered and rushed out from their houses. Just outside the city, a snappy escort of MPs on motorcycles joined the convoy, which now progressed with sirens sounding to the Piazza della Signoria. A carriage driver on the route raised his hat and shouted
“Cosimo, bentornato!”
Keller’s report on the event tells every detail. “This is a long report on a relatively simple operation,” he admitted. But for him it was “a large and important undertaking in terms of giving pleasure to a people who have suffered and in establishing happy relations between these people and their present military governors.”
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