Part Six

I forget the names of the towns without rivers.

A town needs a river to forgive the town.

Whatever river, whatever town—

It is much the same.

The cruel things I did, I took to the river.

I begged the current: make me better.

—RICHARD HUGO,“THE TOWNS WE

KNOW AND LEAVE BEHIND, THE

RIVERS WE CARRY WITH US”

Angels washing books, November—December 1966 (Photograph by David Lees)

1                  

The morning of the 1997 Assisi earthquake I was in Rome. I had come for the art; or rather, I was writing a book about how, for me at least, beauty and art seemed to imply faith, or something close to it. It was about two in the morning and the quake came as a single jolt, a momentary shudder. I’d been awake or sleeping fitfully: the night was hot and the street was noisy. I waited for the shaking to continue, as it would have done at home, on the Pacific coast. When it didn’t I went back to sleep. It didn’t seem to have been, by my definition, an earthquake after all.

In the morning I learned it had indeed been a quake, with its aftershocks a significant one, albeit far away in Assisi. It didn’t preoccupy me. I’d been to Assisi, but my spirituality just then was more Baroque than Franciscan. I suppose the frescoes, hailing down on the stone floor of the basilica, must have made an enormous sound—like a landslide of glass and pebbles, a cascade of Scrabble tiles, a clatter of bones—but I didn’t give it a thought. I was intent on other things: on art and the self I was busy discovering in art’s reflection. Sometimes beauty can blind you to truth.

Thirty years before, in December 1966, on the long cusp between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’d been looking at David Lees’s photographs: the restorer Dino Dini and his workers clambering up the scaffold of the Gaddi Cenacolo; the plaintive, empty-handed Virgin of Santa Croce in her field of melma; Baldini in his azure sweater at the moment they’d discovered the ruined Cimabue Crocifisso. I was fourteen years old.

I looked at them lying, belly down, on the blue sofa in our blue living room, the magazine laid on the floor, my chin on the welting of the cushion, one hand slung to the floor in order to turn the pages. It was an odd way to read—though perhaps it was the only way for me to accommodate the sprawling fourteen-year-old body I was not quite used to—but I looked more than I read. It’s unlikely I took in any of the particulars of the flood or of Florence, never mind of Gaddi and Cimabue. Mostly, I was struck by the colors: gilded, molten, mounting upward into human yet magisterial figures, stern, compassionate, and pitiful; dolorous Mary, Christ suspended in death, Francis among the birds. I loved photography and I had also been religious—not prayerful and certainly not given to good works, but pulled irresistibly toward what seemed to me must be the numinous and infinite: colors, ceremonies, hierarchy; a kind of love and beauty limned with purposeful tragedy that went back two thousand years.

But just then I was giving those things up, my photography and my religion: my novitiate in beauty, in the tears of things as manifested in Jesus and his tender suffering. I’d gotten my first camera in December 1963 and joined the Episcopal Church the same month. I would not have connected the two, but the correspondence now seems unmistakable. Those next three years were happy. My mother and I might have been Dorothy and David Lees—my father was not an artist, never mind a genius, but he had absented himself years before—she practicing such bohemianism as could be mustered in St. Paul, Minnesota, I taking pictures. My heroes, beyond Jesus, Mary, and Francis, were the great Life photographers: Eisenstaedt, Mydans, Feininger, and Bourke-White. And during those three years, the photographs of David Lees—his shots of popes, the Holy Land, the Vatican, Assisi and its frescoes, the hills cowled and vested with olive trees—figured large. I didn’t know his name but I would have envied his life: his Nikons and Linhofs, his spools and sheets of Tri-X and Ektachrome to take hold of the world’s lineaments and shadows and to extract its colors.

But I put that away just then, in December 1966, God and the image, the craving for the luminous and profound. It had nothing to do with the flood, unless the flood in some uncanny way marked those things for me as spoiled, tarnished, and merely old rather than ancient. Soon I’d be remaking myself; driving around in my mother’s car, listening to the top-forty songs on KDWB or WDGY, smoking Marlboros and, later, pot, aspiring to sex and, finally, idealism. But by then, after 1970, it was too late to join the angeli.

I doubt I made, that December, much of the flood itself, only of David Lees’s photographs; and then as pictures, as things in themselves—artworks—rather than as a record or evidence of something else that might have corresponded to something I knew; say, our Mississippi to their Arno, our Mondrian print on the living room wall to their Cimabue, my father to their Azelide. Soon I would pass from seeing photographs to looking at not much more than television or the merest reflection of myself in a mirror. All the rest—the imperative, joyous hunger for created, creaturely beauty and its Creator’s love and glory, my own original vita nuova—was swept away. It couldn’t be recovered, still less restored.

I’d come back to Italy again in 2005, eight years after the Assisi earthquake. This time I was in Florence, trying—so it seems to me now—to write another book about those same things, the things I had lost, and I was flailing. When I noticed the flood marker above our mailbox, the thing that drew me to it, I think, was the concreteness of what it commemorated: it dealt with a fact, anchored in the past, that wove together Florence’s art with its history and people. It seemed to contain and connect everything I was interested in but had not been able to grasp. And investigating it would give me a reason to stay longer in Italy.

The flood was by then thirty-nine years in the past, recent enough that memories were still relatively fresh but also sufficiently distant to have become no more than a historical event. It was over, the story complete, so I thought.

But the first week of November it began to rain. I should say that it had been raining a great deal even by Pacific Northwest standards ever since we’d arrived in September. There’d been thunderstorms and weekly downpours. The ceiling of our apartment began to leak. The landlord didn’t seem very alarmed by this. When it rained a little more, we were told, everything would swell up and the leaks would stop. This proved to be correct. The central maxim of Tuscan home maintenance—maybe of Italian problem-solving in general—was “Ignore it and it will go away.” And although it wouldn’t work in America or perhaps anywhere else, more often than not, here it seemed to hold true.

There was no reason, therefore, to pay any attention to this latest onslaught of rain. But I crossed the Ponte alla Carraia several times a day and I couldn’t help but notice that the river was rising. Trees, branches, and vegetation were piling up around the piers of the bridge. The river was murky and umber, a turbid orangish brown reminiscent of nothing so much as diarrhea. Pausing on the bridge to gaze at the water rushing under it was now both heady and slightly nauseating, like vertigo.

By the third day, November 5, the water was still rising, and when I crossed the bridge that day I was not so much intrigued as apprehensive. The speed at which the water was tearing downstream made me nervous, as though it were a roller coaster that was, if not out of control, moving faster and more precipitously than I’d bargained for. I wanted to get off.

Neither the river nor my anxiety abated. It was not only ironic but creepily ironic that no sooner had I begun to look into the flood of November 4, 1966, than it had risen from its crypt and was chasing me down. Stranger still was the sense that no one but me was remotely alarmed by this.

It seemed, I learned from reading the papers and talking to neighbors, that the river rose nearly every year in early November. This time the water was indeed a bit on the high side, but not excessively so. It didn’t present any danger, but it did afford the opportunity—as in almost every year—for Florentines to rehash the 1966 flood, the matter of who was to blame for it, and the likelihood of it happening again. Inevitably, the supposedly unsolved mystery of the dams would be raised and inevitably ENEL, for the thirty-ninth time, would deny they’d played any role in the deluge. Inevitably too the likelihood of such a flood occurring again would arise—it was said that nothing had been done, or even that things were worse—and inevitably the responsible government agency, L’Autorità di Bacino del Fiume Arno, would respond that, no, a flood on the scale of 1966 almost certainly wouldn’t occur again and that much had been done since then to ensure against it.

So regardless of the state of the river, the beginning of November marked Florence’s annual festa of muttering, backbiting, obfuscation, rationalization, and paranoia that ran for perhaps ten days on either side of the fourth. Beyond the matter of the dams and the potential for future floods, the other perennial debate centered on the current status of the art and books damaged in 1966. And as with the dams and flood prevention, suspicion trumped probability: the operative principle was a corollary to “Ignore it and it will go away,” one that stated that if there is something to hide, someone somewhere will be hiding it.

One ingredient in that latter discussion was Giorgio Vasari. Like most people I had heard of Vasari because of his Lives of the Artists. In fact I had just finished writing a novel that borrowed that very title for satiric purposes. I also knew, like most people, that he had been some sort of artist himself. On the other hand I couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination have named one of his works, still less one that was considered important. Vasari, then, was well known, even famous, in a very modern way: he was a famous artist based on his being an artist who was otherwise famous.

As CRIA had discovered, there was a bottomless market for masterpieces to rescue. Thirty-nine years after the flood all the obvious ones had been saved, but surely, as with the dams and flood abatement, the authorities were hiding something, and a Vasari would suffice to prove it. That was how I encountered Vasari’s Last Supper. It was mentioned in the Italian newspaper I read every morning and also in the national newsmagazines, and the nub of the story was this: bureaucratic ineptitude and cynicism had allowed the painting to molder, unseen, for the last thirty-nine years. It was the scandal of an abandoned masterpiece. That it was a masterpiece that no one knew the name of—that no art historian or connoisseur had ever claimed was a masterpiece—was either beside the point or in some way made its neglect that much more criminal.

Typically, The Last Supper was portrayed as having just been discovered—every November somebody seemed to be stumbling across it—in a pile of junk in a cellar or a barn, but the actual story was a little more complicated and a little less scandalous than that. It was merely pathetic in the quotidian mode, sad in that middling sense that characterized almost everything that touched upon Giorgio Vasari.

The Last Supper had not, in fact, ever really been lost, any more than hundreds of other panel paintings that had had to wait their turns for restoration at the Fortezza. In 1982 its “desperate condition” was publicly noted and an initial plan had been mooted, a trasporto that never went forward. The problem was twofold: on the one hand the painting was severely damaged and its restoration would therefore consume vast quantities of money and time; on the other it wasn’t, by anyone’s lights, a very important work of art. Decisions about which pieces got restored first were similar to choosing a patient for a rare, costly, and difficult operation: which one had the best prospects and would, recuperated, lead the fullest life and make the largest contribution to society? Subjected to that sort of cost-benefit analysis, the Vasari finished in limbo. It wasn’t a write-off but neither did it make a compelling case for immediate action.

So The Last Supper remained in storage near the train station until 1991, when it was moved to another building near the Uffizi. Five years passed and in November 1996, the thirtieth anniversary of the flood, the central panel was put on display in an exhibition titled “Salvate dalle Acque,” “Saved from the Waters.” It had to be exhibited laid flat: the surface, though still secured with Marco Grassi’s application of rice paper, was too fragile to risk dislodging by hanging it upright. Only the head of Peter was visible; the rest of the panel, including the figure of Jesus, was concealed beneath the murky, translucent mask of velinatura. In the catalog it was described as “moribund” and its injuries enumerated: “shrinkage, deformations, and fractures of the wooden support (some several centimeters in size), loss of cohesion of the layers of the ground with consequent loosening and detachment of the painted surface.” That diagnosis referred only to the central panel: the other four, back at the warehouse, were in considerably worse condition.

Three years later the Vasari was moved “temporarily” to another storage room at the Palazzo Serristori. In 2000 the restorer Giovanni Cabras prepared an estimate for the restauro in the amount of 500 million lire, about $400,000, as much as had been spent on any panel painting at the Fortezza thus far. As though in response, The Last Supper was moved back to another storeroom in the Palazzo Pitti, which a journalist would later describe as “squalid.” Returned to the vicinity of the Limonaia, the Vasari had come full circle in thirty-five years, still in exactly the same devastated condition in which it had arrived there in December 1966. An official from the Superintendency explained that in “meritocratic” terms its restauro could not presently be justified.

For the succeeding three Novembers The Last Supper did not attract much attention or comment: the usual conspiracies surrounding the dams as well as forecasts of future cataclysms were rolled out and the customary official responses volleyed back, but conditions on the art front remained relatively calm. However, on November 1, 2003, a journalist named Marco Ferri, writing in Florence’s Giornale della Toscana, published an article that was, compared to previous exposés on the flooded artworks, explosive.

Ferri was not only a professional journalist but an academically trained historian. In composing his story, he didn’t simply marshal the usual statistics of unrestored objects and the neglect of supposed masterpieces, but put in months of legwork around Florence and the surrounding countryside with Superintendency inventories, a flashlight, and a photographer. What he found did indeed seem to be a scandal, extending from the “morgue” that contained the Vasari at the Palazzo Pitti to a hundred thousand unrestored books (36,000 of which were still mud-encrusted) at the Biblioteca Nazionale to the “Dantesque” conditions at a former Medici farmstead in the hills. The latter contained literal heaps, ton upon ton, of damaged furniture, artworks, and furnishings—a near landslide of candelabra, for example—from flooded churches. Amid those darkened rooms and cellars, Ferri also discovered the disassembled altar of Vasari whose ciborio had replaced the Cimabue Crocifisso in Santa Croce four centuries earlier.

Ferri’s exposé produced outrage in Florence, but thanks to the media empire of sometime Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, it acquired a national and international audience as well. The Berlusconi-owned newsweekly Panorama gave Ferri’s story a second life (even if no credit to the reporter himself), dubbing the storage sites he’d uncovered “depots of shame.” And with that, the relatively measured annual discourse about the flooded art took on an unpredictable, even frenzied character. The room where the Vasari Last Supper was housed was, Panorama reported, “cold and dusty, with broken windows and heaps of tools dangerously close to other artworks, which are piled here and there protected only by cellophane.”

Suddenly, reporters and photographers were converging around the Fortezza on the track of heretofore meek and anonymous art historians and restorers. The press and the public it purported to represent insisted on statements, explanations and, still more, immediate action. Pumped for answers, one official allowed that it might take ten years just to remove the velinatura from the Vasari. This was not what people wanted to hear, not this November.

But within a short time the Fortezza summoned up the public relations skills it had possessed during the Baldini regime. Florentines wanted results and the press had already produced a poster child in the form of the Vasari. Suddenly, it made sense to revise what had previously seemed a well-reasoned restoration program for all the flooded artworks and make The Last Supper a top priority. If it hadn’t been a masterpiece before, it had just become one.

The official put in charge, Marco Ciatti, the Fortezza’s expert on panel paintings, hadn’t seen the Vasari before. After examining it carefully, he said to his superiors, Ma voi mi chiedete un miracolo, “But you’re asking me for a miracle.”

The Fortezza could try refastening the paint to the warped panels or attempt a trasporto. But neither of these were likely to succeed: where the Allori Deposition, for example, had cracks, ridges, and valleys, the Vasari had chasms. Ciatti could only plead for time, the principal thing a scandalized public and a voracious media would deny him. He’d made his own discovery in a Palazzo Pitti storeroom thirteen years ago: a Deposition by Salviati, also from Santa Croce, in a dank stack of planks. They’d been working on it ever since then and it would need two more years. With The Last Supper he would have liked to take a couple of years just to do tests and consider his options: the most likely outcome of any hasty intervention would be to make things worse, to do irretrievable damage. Yet people seemed to expect to have the Vasari, restored, better than new, the day after tomorrow.

Still, the public had to be satisfied. A gesture toward at least the appearance of action had to be made. In January 2004, two months after Ferri’s story appeared, the Vasari, now insured for €100,000, was moved to the Fortezza with film crews from the BBC in train. Inside, the panels were ceremoniously laid into a custom-built steel storage cradle, a sliding drawer for each of the five panels. And with that procession and display finished, Ciatti hoped, there would be time to think, to conjure up his miracolo.

By the second week of November the river had returned to its normal level, but every day I saw the tangle of flotsam wrapped around the northernmost pier of the Ponte alla Carraia, a haystack-sized islet upon which birds and nutria—the possum-sized rodents who live along the banks—had begun to install themselves. I assumed their residence would be short-lived. I’d been in Florence two months and although I could manage in the Italian language, my grasp of how things were done here—how actions and reactions unfolded—was childlike. That it might sit there indefinitely, like the pile of rubble and debris in our cortile, was a notion beyond my imagination.

Similarly, when I read a feature story in one of Italy’s most important national newspapers, Corriere della Sera, about the unrestored artworks in storage, I was scandalized, but scandalized in the American mode: why, I wondered of this state of affairs, didn’t they fix it? It would take me some time to understand that Florentines would be scandalized in an almost radically different way: of course they wanted the art restored, but the essence of their preoccupation was the certainty that someone, corrupt and/or derelict, ought to be hung out to dry, but, just as certainly, that nothing would be done. You might imagine that given this combination of convictions, there was little point in becoming outraged in the first place. But being Continental Europeans, they were scandalized dialectically; they could maintain their hope and cynicism simultaneously, their faith in art and in the infinite, incorrigible variety of human misbehavior perfectly intact in parallel lines of thought.

As an American, I also didn’t understand the Florentine dialectic of art and life: I assumed that the scandal of the dams was vastly more significant than that of the artworks. Human lives, after all, had been at stake, and I’d managed to collect quite a dossier of supposedly undisclosed truths around the neighborhood. For example, everyone knew they’d never released the real death toll: the official number, thirty-three, was assurdo; the true count must be ten times that. Who knew? And of course, there were the warnings that had obviously been given to well-connected people who happened to be rich, goldsmiths and dealers in gems—che coincidenza! Finally, it went without saying that everyone knew they’d panicked at the dams and dumped a tidal wave onto the city. Then they’d covered up the whole thing, the capo “they” on behalf of the minion “they.” Within these other dialectics there was, I guessed, a third dialect of power and secrecy, just as eternal, consisting of “everyone” and “they.”

With my American naiveté I imagined there was someone “in charge” and that if I could interview this person, I could get to the bottom of things. As it happened, there was: the director of L’Autorità di Bacino del Fiume Arno, who, more amazingly, was willing to speak to me. He was a wiry, visibly intense man about my own age. Inside the palazzo housing the Autorità we sat in his frescoed office—such offices in Florence have frescoes the way offices in America have framed posters exalting “teamwork” and “excellence”—and with his computer and maps he told me about the river. When he was done, I had to admit that to maintain that the dams had caused or even significantly exacerbated the flood was itself assurdo.

I hadn’t been taken in or snowed. The director was a specimen of government official I’d never encountered, deeply versed in art, film, history, and poetry. He was just then in the midst of compiling a Dizionario dell’Arno, a gazetteer of everything there was to know about the river from hydrology to Leonardo to wildlife to Dante. He ’d had a good education—as classical as it was scientific—at a school in Santa Croce called Pestalozzi, which had unfortunately been wiped out in 1966. He’d wanted to help with the flood then, but his mother hadn’t let him, not initially. Now he was in charge of the whole river.

Giovanni Menduni knew art, literature, and politics—with his tapered goatee and fine hands, he looked very much the Florentine humanist savant—but he also knew his science and his facts: short of blowing up both dams simultaneously, there was no way anyone either accidentally or deliberately could have started or seriously augmented the flood of 1966. And it was extremely unlikely a flood on that scale would occur in the future: human interventions that had decreased the Arno’s capacity or increased its velocity had been ameliorated, and a network of overflow basins had been built along the river into which future floodwaters could be diverted. And if there was a flood even bigger than 1966 that could overwhelm these new defenses, there would be effective warnings. A much more extensive and sophisticated system of meteorological and hydrological data collection tied together by computer modeling would assure that everyone and everything could be moved to safety in advance.

In all this Menduni hadn’t quite carried out Leonardo’s grand scheme—although it was five hundred years ahead of its time, it wasn’t perfect—but da Vinci was his mentor, his patron saint. Leonardo the engineer had created a reclamation plan for the Arno that in its scale and invasiveness was, by modern standards, scarcely environmentally sensitive. But Leonardo the artist had drawn and, still more, dreamed a river that was both terrifying and sublime, not a channel for carrying water but an organism, an entity that embodied chaos, making and unmaking itself. The effects and images it produced—sculpted, tinted, and curved—were stunning and almost always beautiful where they were not terrible. The Arno was no work of art, but perhaps it was an artist.

Giovanni Menduni had the sensibility and vision of Leonardo, but he also required some of the skills of Machiavelli. When—and it was never a question of “if”—a major flood did come, he would be more involved than his mother forty years before could ever have dreamed. In the interim, and particularly each November, he was Tuscany’s chief fielder of riverine speculation. Florence wanted to hear that everything could be made reliable, predictable, and safe, and they also wanted someone to blame when, inevitably, it didn’t turn out that way. They wanted what they imagined was scientific certainty when the best Menduni could offer them—and he was honest and frank, a realist if not a cynic—were likelihoods. His science and, even more, Leonardo told him that the Arno was an organism, a machine, if you liked, whose nature was to flood. It was made to flood, even in some providential way intended to flood, and you really couldn’t expect it to do otherwise. It did what it could do, not what it ought to do.

2                  

Advent and Christmas came and went, and the weather grew bitter. It was hard to imagine this was paradisal Italy, land of Goethe’s blooming lemon trees. The freeze held into January, and day after day I shuddered on a park bench while Andrew played soccer, oblivious to the viscously cold air through which he and his friends moved. I was busy learning about the Arno, not just in 1966 but all the deluges going back to Roman times. I wanted to catch up on everything there was to know about the subject before next November, the fortieth anniversary of the 1966 flood.

There would doubtless be the habitual recriminations, but I’d also been hearing that preparations were under way for exhibitions, memorials, and a grand reunion of mud angels. But on January 19 someone jumped the gun. Italy’s minister of civil defense in Rome, Guido Bertolaso, announced that he had found €250,000 with which to restore Vasari’s Last Supper. This might not have been surprising—in Italy’s various state and local departmental treasuries money got “found” rather like old, apparently lost bags in a railroad station checkroom—but the source of the funds was incongruous, rather as if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were gifting the National Gallery a piece of its budget to buy a Giorgione.

The Vasari had, of course, been damaged in a flood that, after a fashion, was within the Department of Civil Defense’s portfolio. The following week Bertolaso announced, as though an afterthought, that €200,000 was needed to make the Arno “safe” (whatever “safe” meant), albeit without any mention of where or when the €200,000 might be “found.” All this was news to Giovanni Menduni.

The officials of the Superintendency and the art historians and restorers of the Fortezza were even more puzzled. Bertolaso was a Berlusconi appointee, dubbed l’uomo dalle mani d’oro, “the man with the golden hands,” by one newspaper, and a bit of a grandstander. No one knew anything about the money: where precisely it had come from, when it would be disbursed, or what restrictions might be attached to its use. The money ought to have represented good news, but if Bertolaso turned out to be a loose cannon and his money disappeared back into the lost-and-found depot where it had come from, the Vasari’s prospects would be that much worse: the Fortezza had been trying to raise restoration funds from the national government through its own channels, and the appearance of Bertolaso’s €250,000 might make that effort look redundant. Moreover, in parallel with the Fortezza an Anglo-American charity, “The Angels of Florence,” had been pushing forward with its own appeal for a major grant to perform the tests and studies Marco Ciatti needed to start the restauro. Now that too was in jeopardy.

Nor was Rome quite finished with Florence. Later in the spring, the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro launched a new sortie against the Fortezza, appealing to the incoming government of the new prime minister, Romano Prodi, to “rationalize and unify” restauro in Italy by placing the Fortezza under its control. I had wanted to talk to Marco Ciatti for some time, but through the spring he was obviously preoccupied, not to say harried, his Fortezza under an almost literal siege.

In May I finally got to see him. Ciatti was a slight man with a pendant walrus mustache and wore a tie with a collar that was just a little too big for him. A pair of spectacles dangled from a chain around his neck. In all, he looked long-faced and stooped. We talked about the Istituto’s power grab. For him, it wasn’t about Procacci versus Brandi or Baldini and Casazza versus the Moras or a high art variant of Florence’s ancient feuds with Siena or Pisa. It was now a matter of two different styles of doing restauro, both of which ought to be honored and preserved. Florence had no problem with Rome’s handling of Assisi or its controversial role in the cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes during the 1980s and early 1990s. Why couldn’t the Istituto extend the same regard to the Fortezza?

On Bertolaso’s €250,000 (of which there had been no sign or news after four months) and on funding in general, Ciatti seemed to be of two or even three minds. On the one hand, of course, he needed money, perhaps something on the order of €500,000 to begin with. And he had 40 percent less money overall to work with at the Fortezza than he’d had five years ago. But then he seemed to reverse himself: “If I had Rockefeller’s millions, it wouldn’t change anything,” he said almost dolefully. “It just takes time.” Given the duration of projects like the Cimabue Crocifisso or the Salviati Deposizione—ten and fifteen years respectively—that seemed self-evident, even if the public and media would never grasp or accept the necessity. More than anything, I felt, Ciatti wanted to be left alone.

But as he walked me back to the area of the Laboratorio where the planks of the Vasari were kept, he brightened. We maneuvered past dozens of artworks undergoing restauro, some of them as massive as the Cimabue cross, others small as icons; some brilliantly colored and gilded, others extraordinarily worn, shabby, and dull, junk from a Renaissance landfill.

The racks on which the panels of the Vasari lay were dark blue steel surmounted by a sign with their corporate sponsor’s name. When Ciatti reached down to pull one of the five out on its rollers, I held my breath. I was about to see a work of art I had never seen except in preflood photographs (only black-and-white images had ever been made), a relic untouched since November 1966, panels that five centuries ago had been touched by Giorgio Vasari. It wasn’t a Michelangelo, but it was by someone who’d known Michelangelo, who’d claimed to have been Michelangelo’s pupil and friend.

But what Marco Ciatti revealed to me was nothing at all: a dirty gray board pasted over with what might have been toilet paper, breaks in the tissue patched with further scraps of toilet paper like stanched shaving cuts. The panel was cracked and fissured, incised and pocked with welts and blisters. It wasn’t even a ruin. It wasn’t picturesque. If you’d found it in your barn or cellar, you would have thrown it out. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble to burn.

After some time, on the central panel, in the upper-left-hand corner, I was able to make out a little of what must have been Peter registering his shock at Jesus’ prophecy from under the grime. But that was all there was to see.

Why, I wanted to know, had Vasari’s painting fared so badly in the flood, worse in many ways than the Cimabue Crocifisso, which had been completely immersed? Cimabue, Ciatti explained, had been meticulous in his selection of materials and preparations. He had the best heartwood sawn from poplar logs for his panels, laid down his gesso in smooth, polished layers, and sheathed it in one continuous piece of canvas. Vasari, by contrast, used “tangential” cuts of lumber from the sides of the logs, put a thin layer of gesso on the wood, and painted directly upon it. Perhaps it was a matter of how the two painters had viewed themselves. Cimabue saw himself as a craftsman. His carpentry, his preparation of the ground, and the image he brushed and gilded onto it were all essential parts of the object he was making. Vasari, on the other hand, was an artist, a role he himself had helped invent. His eye was on the classical geniuses of the past and the posterity that he hoped the future might bestow on him, on Neoplatonic conceptions of beauty and the ideal rather than wood, glue, and gesso, on the art rather than the artwork. He wasn’t unique in this: painted panels from the sixteenth century were among the most severely damaged victims of the flood.

“An American restorer told me it would be impossible to do anything with it,” Ciatti said, his hand outstretched, palm up, in a gesture that might have signified either revelation or resignation. Maybe he thought I would come to understand the enormity of what he’d been asked to undertake if the assessment came from a fellow citizen. But I didn’t need convincing. There was a tawdry coating of failure and loss all over Vasari’s panels. I couldn’t wait to get away from them.

Still, we stood there. Ciatti shook his head, and then he said, “There’s something that might work.” Trasporto was, of course, out of the question. You couldn’t excavate the wood away from behind in the usual way, not when in some places the paint had erupted a half inch upward from the original panel. After trasporto you’d have a crumpled, brittle membrane of paint that would disintegrate if you so much as looked at it sideways.

And, after all, what, Ciatti asked, was a panel painting without a panel? Trasporto was as falsifying as it was risky: in sacrificing the wood panel, it destroyed an entire physical and visual dimension of the artwork in order to save the two-dimensional image. It was only defensible as a last resort, even assuming you could carry it off. Ciatti had something else in mind, something he’d tried on a less ambitious scale almost twenty years before. There’d been a flood-damaged panel Crocifisso by Giotto’s contemporary Lippo di Benivieni from Santa Croce, in similar condition. As Baldini had done with the Cimabue, they viewed its wooden support as an essential part of the work and therefore ruled out trasporto. Instead, they’d used a custom-made saw to slice the paint and its ground longitudinally from the panel in one piece. The paint—now two millimeters thick—was intact, as was the original panel. After the rucked and blistered ground of the paint was leveled and reconsolidated it was reunited with the panel. The only inauthentic ingredient in the entire work was the thin layer of bonding that held them together.

Ciatti’s saw was analogous to a microtome, a device used to cut tissue samples for lab analysis. But with the Vasari, to maintain a consistent thickness the blade would have to move not just through the wood laterally but up or down relative to the uneven surface. Ciatti was thinking that by using new technology, the irregularities could be mapped with lasers and the blade guided by computer. It was all speculation at this point. They needed money and time—especially time—to see what was possible.

As we walked back Ciatti greeted several of his staff. One of them was Paola Bracco, who I knew had been Ornella Casazza’s partner on the Crocifisso. She’d also worked on the di Benivieni that Ciatti had just been telling me about. She stood in her white lab coat next to a small panel painting, a late medieval saint from the look of it. Her hand rested on an adjacent table crowded with chemicals, paint, brushes, and tools. Bracco looked to be about sixty-five, keen, genial, but unassuming. Unlike Casazza, she was still, now, a quotidian practitioner of her craft, an artisan-physician to wounded artworks. I imagined she must be content, although I knew nothing of her life. As Ciatti and I departed I shook her hand. I’d spent a lot of time by now studying Cimabue, and this was the hand that for an entire year had tended his broken Christ.

3                  

It was May and in a month I’d have to return to America. On the Ponte alla Carraia there was a truck with a hoist and a team of laborers with chain saws, some of them wearing scuba gear. They were standing on the tangle of debris wrapped around the north pier, cutting through the larger trunks, then attaching the hoist’s cable to pull them loose. But beyond clipping back some of the longer trees and limbs, they didn’t succeed much in reducing the bulk of the islet. Five months of the Arno bearing down on it had compacted and consolidated the snarl of flotsam into an impenetrably solid mesh. The workers might have been embarrassed to have accomplished so little with their engines, cables, and chain saws. Surely their ancestors seven hundred years ago hadn’t been so easily stymied.

It was by then time for me to find Umberto Baldini. He was eighty-four years old, but by all accounts vigorous. After his retirement he’d founded a private college of restauro and museum curating, the Università Internazionale dell’Arte, where he was still teaching. I’d gotten his phone number and I’d been told he was approachable, that he even liked to give interviews.

I dialed the number and I was afraid he wouldn’t answer. Or that he would answer. Baldini was by now a legendary figure in my mind, maybe mythic. He had become the central figure in my story—at least among the living—without my quite intending it, almost as large as the river. But he, or someone, answered. It was an old if not weary voice, cultured and modulated. It was Baldini. I told him who I was, and his tone rose, as though he knew who I was. Maybe he’d heard about the American asking questions about the flood, asking questions about him.

He told me to call back in a week. He was busy reading papers and exams. It was the end of the academic year. I shouldn’t worry—we’d talk. I felt relieved.

Seven days later, to the day, to the hour, I telephoned again. He knew it was me before I’d said three words, and I was taken aback at this eerie prescience. (It didn’t occur to me that my execrable Italian delivered in a Midwestern buzz-saw accent might distinguish me from his other habitual callers.) He told me to call back next week. He was still reading exams.

When I called back a week later a woman answered. I asked if Dottore Baldini was there. No, she said. I told her that he had told me to call him today, as though this would somehow have precluded him from going out. “He’s in the hospital,” she said. I asked, densely, when he’d be back. “I don’t know. He’s old. He’s sick,” she replied, and hung up. Months later I realized the woman must have been Ornella Casazza.

Two weeks afterward I was back in Seattle. I spent the summer reading about Cimabue, Vasari, Leonardo, and the first art tourists and expatriates who followed them to Florence. On August 17 I read Umberto Baldini’s obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He had, indeed, been a great man, great enough to have his passing noticed far away in a medium-sized city in America. “Savior of Florentine Art,” the subheadline said.

I felt dread: I’d lost my chance to speak to my protagonist. There were things he knew that no one else knew. But I was also strangely relieved. I wouldn’t have to undergo the trial of trying to appear competent before him, to ask intelligent questions, to extract the truth I wanted from him. Just a month earlier I’d had dinner with a prominent art historian. Hearing I was researching the Crocifisso, he said, “It’s Baldini who should have been crucified for what he did to that Cimabue.”

Perhaps I feared I wouldn’t know what to make of him; that I’d be either taken in or too suspicious, that I wouldn’t be able truly to see him or—perhaps just as likely—to see past him. But now he’d eluded me, slipped away into the great sea. That, people might have said, was just like him.

Whatever I wrote now would be, by necessity, a variety of restauro, with all its concomitant dilemmas of falsification; of infilling, abstraction, and synthetic bonds. If I was fortunate, it might be as good as his Cimabue, or at least not worse: 20 percent of Baldini would still be apparent in it and the rest wouldn’t be a gross distraction or distortion. But then I’d been to see the Crocifisso a dozen times and I couldn’t make the least sense of it—of whether it was a masterpiece and whether Baldini’s restauro added or detracted from it. It was tempting to use the word “enigmatic,” surely one of the great clichés in discourse about art: there was the enigma of the Mona Lisa, of Piero della Francesca, of Caravaggio, and, later, of much of the entire modern movement. It might indicate mystery, the refusal of the work of art to resolve itself in an expected way, or pure incomprehension on the viewer’s part—a failure of imagination, vision, or simple nerve.

But Cimabue’s Crocifisso was no enigma at all. It was, I thought, what it was, and it remained so: Francis’s fully human Christ. To claim that the chromatic abstraction somehow prevented one from seeing it was to be thick as a plank or maybe just God’s fool, as Francis himself claimed to be. But, still, was it beautiful? Was it art?

4                  

When I returned to Florence in September I discovered there had been, beyond the death of Umberto Baldini, other developments. In July, Guido Bertolaso of the Department of Civil Defense had announced that he’d found another €200,000, which he was earmarking for the restauro of Donatello’s David in the Bargello. As with The Last Supper, no one in Florence knew anything about it. Also, as before, none of €250,000 promised for the Vasari earlier had yet turned up at the Fortezza. Regardless, the Angels of Florence group announced they were withdrawing from the Last Supper restoration. There were other worthy projects, and the grandstanding and incoherence surrounding the Vasari made it an untenable situation.

Meanwhile Marco Ferri’s investigations on behalf of Il Giornale della Toscana had turned up another eight abandoned paintings in a Palazzo Pitti storage room that was supposed to be empty. When interviewed, the official in charge of the deposito explained that that particular depositowas outside her jurisdiction. But apparently it wasn’t under anyone else’s either.

I’d gone back to work interviewing people and reading old records and newspapers. Late in September, the month of the lowest water on the Arno, the divers and chain saw cutters came back again to the north pier of Ponte alla Carraia. It was a reassuring sight. After a few days they disappeared, and, although I was quite convinced they hadn’t made so much as a dent in the thicket, that too was reassuring. I was becoming, I imagined, acclimated in Florence.

Through the autumn my intention was to learn everything I could about restauro and, more particularly, about Umberto Baldini. I went to see Cristina Acidini, who was superintendent of both the Fortezza and the Uffizi. She’d been a mud angel at age fourteen and now she held Ugo Procacci’s old position. When Baldini had died in the summer of 2006, she wrote the official tribute on behalf of the Superintendency.

Acidini’s conversation seemed to me a curious mixture of official discretion and frankness. She didn’t volunteer anything about Baldini that wasn’t in the obituary she had already written, but was happy to discuss the parlous state of the Superintendency itself. She didn’t, for example, have money in her budget to buy fuel for the motor fleet, but there was, on the other hand, several €100,000 earmarked and ready for projects there wasn’t time or staff to launch. Her responsibilities overlapped with other directors of other agencies. Only Rome, apparently, had a copy of the organization chart. “We’re all pieces on the ministry’s chessboard,” she sighed.

Acidini had, however, news regarding the Vasari Last Supper. Bertolaso had in fact finally issued a check for the €250,000, but had sent it to the wrong bank account. It should have gone to the Patrimonio Storico Artistico at the Palazzo Pitti. I should go talk to its director, an art historian named Bruno Santi.

Santi too had been a mud angel, an art history student in 1966, who nearly forfeited his last exam on account of the flood. Now he held one of the most important cultural posts in Tuscany. We sat in his office in the Palazzo Pitti, the rooms Ugo Procacci had occupied when the Germans blew up the bridges and Frederick Hartt rolled up in his Lucky 13. Like Acidini, Santi offered me only the customary boilerplate about Baldini, but he did tell me he’d first met him in the Limonaia just after the flood: he and another mud angel, an English kid named John Schofield, had been put in charge of keeping mold off the Cimabue Crocifisso. Baldini and his restorers hadn’t even realized that the cross was being consumed from the rear by runaway mold. But he and Schofield had gotten it under control; or, really, John had. All the ideas, right down to buying a drugstore perfume atomizer, had been his. John Schofield was one of the people, as much as Procacci and Baldini, who’d saved the Crocifisso. I should call him—I promised Santi I would—and say hello from Bruno. Maybe they’d see each other again this November.

The fortieth-anniversary commemorations of the flood were already in evidence by early October. A mud angel reunion had been scheduled, discussion panels organized, and exhibitions curated. Nick Kraczyna’s photographs from the first few days of the flood were going to be published by the press of Syracuse University, on whose Florence faculty he now taught printmaking. Marco Ciatti had composed a massive catalog to accompany the unveilings of the Fortezza’s restauro of the Salviati Deposition and other works from Santa Croce. Giovanni Menduni would do a reading from his Dizionario.

The habitual discussions and suspicions of every other anniversary of the flood were also surfacing, albeit more prominently and insistently than in other years. Giorgio Bocca, perhaps the most distinguished journalist in Italy, weighed in on the dams. Bocca had fought as a partisan against the Nazis, which lent him an authority, at least on the political left, few commentators could match. He lamented the “recklessness of those who had allowed the flood to take place” and cited the Sunday Times investigation of forty years earlier as his authority, the gospel in what had long ago become a matter of belief rather than fact.

Meanwhile Marco Ciatti launched an uncharacteristic preemptive counterattack against the accusations he correctly assumed would come with the anniversary. The legend of the Cimabue Crocifisso floating facedown in the refectory—everyone knew it; people had seen it, regardless of what they had said—was by now an old if unforgotten canard. But Ferri’s exposé and Bertolaso’s showy largesse from Rome had sharpened the media’s taste for stories of the Fortezza’s supposed ineptitude and procrastination. In his catalog for the Fortezza’s exhibition Ciatti wrote, “Only the arrogant superficiality of a few journalists has allowed the responsible methodological attitude followed in projects [by the Fortezza] to be interpreted as an incapacity to act.” Not since Baldini had appealed to the evidence of David Lees’s photographs of the upright Crocifisso had the Fortezza been so assertive in its self-defense.

For whatever reasons, by the beginning of November it seemed to me that the predicted carping had been replaced by a sense of occasion, of a suddenly recognized need to remember and to think rather than speculate and blame; to recollect the losses and the deeds of those days in a serious and even self-critical manner. I was surprised, for example, to read an interview with Antonio Paolucci, one of Cristina Acidini’s predecessors at the Superintendency, that seemed to suggest Florence’s art was at the root of some of the city’s problems rather than purely its crowning glory. The city was a “monoculture,” “a kind of victim of art,” that was driving out traditional artisans in favor of “shows” rather than genuine new artwork and restauro of the old. Florence was in real danger of becoming a museum of itself, not just in the highbrow Berensonian sense, but in embodying all the worst aspects of the contemporary world of blockbuster exhibitions: the museum as a brand, a theme park dislocated from place, time, or context; from what Ruskin would have simply called the real.

The Arno too was being seen in a different light. Florentines had never imagined it as simply the villain of 1966, but as a moody, obstreperous relation, half child and half paterfamilias. You couldn’t really blame the river; if Florentines hadn’t wanted to deal with it, they shouldn’t have moved their settlement down from Fiesole two millennia ago.

That attitude was manifest at a reading and panel discussion of Giovanni Menduni’s Dizionario dell’Arno a few days before the anniversary. There were questions about the Arno as a present danger to be controlled as well as the possibility of being able to predict its floods. Menduni responded to these a little impatiently. It was Leonardo’s Arno, it seemed, that he wanted to talk about and to reflect upon, the Arno as metaphor, as the connecting thread that ran through Florence and Tuscany’s heart and soul, the creative force that sculpted and washed it away, so as to begin again. The Arno was, for Menduni, the Hammond B-3 he’d never owned—the one that the river itself had drowned and smashed to splinters—upon which he could improvise and compose.

5                  

I’d imagined November 4, 2006, would be something like November 4, 2005, or perhaps even November 4, 1966. But it resembled neither of those. It was eerily clear, still, and cool, like a placid summer day with the temperature lowered by thirty degrees. I got up early. There were a half dozen events I wanted to attend, most of them overlapping.

The first was a mass in the Duomo presided over by the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Antonelli, in memory of the dead and in honor of the city emergency workers who’d rescued the survivors. On an ordinary day, the Duomo was divided into two parts, the rear two-thirds swarming with tourists and the area around the altar reserved for prayer and services, nearly deserted but thrumming with the overspill of tourists’ voices. But today the whole place was opened up, filled from one end to the other with neither tourists nor the devout, but ordinary Florentines, working Florentines who normally stayed in their own neighborhoods, in San Frediano or Santa Croce. A large number of them wore the uniforms of police, firefighters, and paramedics. These were the Florentines you never saw anywhere near the Duomo, reclaiming the heart of their city for a day.

The mass began with a procession, the same slightly disconcerting mix of the ecclesiastical and the civic, the Franciscan and Machiavellian, that had attended Pope Paul on Christmas 1966. Men in martial Renaissance dress carried the Gonfalone, Florence’s republican flag, followed by a line of priests, deacons, acolytes, and the cardinal. The Duomo was crammed with people, and I pressed myself up against a column perhaps thirty feet from the altar. A portrait of Dante—Giotto’s friend, the recorder of Cimabue’s declining fame—was fixed on the wall opposite me, and above me was Vasari’s painted cupola, the vast rendering of Heaven and Hell that covered the inscape of Brunelleschi’s dome. It was Vasari’s last public work and his most prestigious, the plum project he hadn’t lived to see finished.

The mass began and I watched the demons and the damned they tormented hovering above me. Their heavenly counterparts seemed a little bland in comparison. That was the usual complaint about Vasari. He hadn’t painted God and Christ in their majesty and mercy, but flattered them. But his monsters were monstrous.

Then came the readings. The first was the story of Noah. I’d wondered if anyone would allude to it today, and had imagined no, it would be obvious or corny and possibly in bad taste. It seemed neither apt nor kind to impose this fairy tale on people who’d lost real loved ones, homes, and livelihoods in the flood: their story was a fact while this was a “story.” But although I thought I knew a fair amount about how to “read” a work of art like the Vasari looming overhead, I’d seemed to have lost the capacity to read a story like this one.

I couldn’t see that Noah’s story was the story of both the flood and every flood, as Mary was both the mother and every mother in all the Maestàs of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto. It’s in this way that images and stories extend themselves outward to include and comprehend each and every particular; come to mean rather than merely stand apart as objects, to incorporate us and our experience within them. That capability, before we started calling it art, was art. And that was why, in Cimabue’s day, when every crocifisso was the Crocifisso—particular and universal, every example an exemplar—the maker took such pains over his timber, his ground, and his paints.

So, as they listened to the Noah story, there were three or four thousand Florentines—cops, nurses, firefighters, people who ran cafés and bars, bakers, clerks, and carpenters—who understood this, even if it was beyond me. And what happened at the end of the Noah story was a promise: that, when the waters withdrew, there would be a new alleanza—a compact or alliance—between God and man, between Creator and creature, between hope and this broken, drowned, sodden world. So Noah and the deluge, in fact, was precisely the story to read on this occasion. There was no irony in it. For Francis, Cimabue, and even Vasari, the promise was going to be fulfilled, and that was why you painted Last Suppers and Crocifissi. There’d been a flood and there was loss and now there would be consolation. And so we go on.

Maybe, huddled against my pillar, scratching in my notebook, I didn’t really “read” anything as well as I thought I did, least of all art. Maybe I didn’t even understand the Vasari looming overhead, at least not well enough to claim that my taste was of a higher order than Vasari’s technique.

After the readings the cardinal rose to give his homily, and I expected truisms and uplifting hooey from him, or at best elegies. He mentioned, of course, the rescue workers, the angeli, and the patient, sometimes misunderstood Catholic humanism of Mayor Bargellini. But he also took up the notion of a new alleanza from the Noah story and asked what it might mean. What kind of city would Florence be after its flood? The cardinal was tough-minded. As matters stood, Florence hadn’t done much on its side of the bargain. Today the centro was dominated by offices, high-end shops, tourists, and overseas students able to pay exorbitant rents while artisans and working families were abandoning their historic quartieri, leaving a lonely and sick population of the elderly behind. It was a harsh assessment, but, he said, a necessary one. The energies people had found in themselves forty years ago needed to be revived. Community, family, and faith would help, but so too would art, leading into and out of them. I couldn’t make out the last few words of the cardinal’s homily, but I know—I heard it clearly—that the final one was bellezza, “beauty.”

After the mass, I went to the Palazzo Vecchio for a reunion of the angeli held in the building’s grandest public room, the Salone dei Cinquecento. By my reckoning—no one knew exactly—there had been at most fifteen hundred angeli. If so, it seemed that almost all of them were here, a mass of late-middle-aged people who looked surprisingly youthful—the mud had preserved them, someone joked—talking ebulliently, almost desperately, in the manner of people who have shared an adventure and haven’t seen each other in a very long time. They were surrounded by a younger generation of television crews, reporters, and organizers, men and women who might have been their children; not much older than they’d been in 1966.

The official program began with flags, more men in Renaissance costumes, and welcomes from civic officials. John Schofield’s friend from art school in London, Susan Glasspool, spoke. In many ways she embodied the collective experience of the angeli. Bilingual, possessed by a love of art, she’d come from another country, but had stayed. She’d saved books and artworks, and best of all, she’d found love, a husband among her fellow angeli. Like everyone else’s subsequent life, her story was not quite the one they’d all envisioned forty years before: the world had not been transformed, was arguably no better than it had been, and maybe a little worse. But they had saved a bit of the better parts of it, maybe even some of the best of it, a masterpiece here or there. They’d believed, against cynicism and despair, that there was something in it worth saving; things that meant more than themselves, things that could save you by your saving them.

The angeli were by no means congratulating themselves, but they seemed pleased and somehow surprised to be in Florence again, together. Had they really been here all those years ago, in all that cold, damp, and mud? They hadn’t been heroes: they’d been having the time of their lives. The odd thing was not so much the memory of what had been, but that they’d ended up here, after all this time, as old people, having persisted all that while just like everything they’d saved in Florence. I’d been looking for John Schofield—we’d talked on the telephone several times—but he hadn’t been able to come. He was busy renovating his family’s old home in Cornwall, busy tending his mother, who was old and ailing. Restauro, sempre.

My eye wandered up the high walls and ceiling, tumescent with gilding and murals. Here, as in the Duomo, we were being overseen by another gargantuan Vasari, his La Battaglia di Marciano, whose clashing armies formed a kind of counterpart to the milling angeli below. It was said that Vasari overpainted his mural on an unfinished Leonardo masterpiece, La Battaglia di Anghiari; genius wallpapered over by competent mediocrity, as the connoisseurs would have it. In upper center was Vasari’s cryptic legend cerca trova, “seek, find,” which some believe is a coded reference to the painting underneath, which might even be intact, protected behind a hollow cavity. The word “enigma” again came uselessly to mind. Vasari was famously practical, not someone given to sly mysteries or hoaxes. So perhaps cerca trova meant no more or less than the tale of Noah did; perhaps it meant to simply get on with your work, mine, Vasari’s, or anyone’s.

Just before noon I went to the Arno, to the Ponte Vecchio. It was full of people but didn’t feel crowded in the usual way. It was almost silent. The bells would begin to toll soon, all over the city, up and down the river. Drummers in Renaissance dress would pound out a dull funereal beat. Children in red jackets were standing by, waiting, holding lilies and marguerites. All this for the dead.

At noon the bells and drums began and the children gathered at the center of the downstream side of the bridge. They had perhaps three dozen flowers in all, one for each victim; one at least for the youngest, Marina Ripari, who would now be forty-three; one for the bravest, Carlo Maggiorelli, who stayed at his post on the aqueduct until the water siphoned him away; one for the one who suffered most of all, Azelide Benedetti, who drowned in the cage of her apartment, lashed to her window bars.

The children began to throw their flowers over the parapet into the river. The flowers would float on the Arno all the way to the sea. They’d drift in the Tyrrhenian like beautiful wreckage. But the river was slack today, dead still, so unlike itself. The flowers languished motionless, almost beneath the arch of the bridge. Then—perhaps an invisible puff of Shelley’s west wind came up, or perhaps it was a trick of the eye—the river almost seemed for an instant to be flowing upstream, carrying the flowers with it, against itself, back toward Monte Falterona. Cerca trova. You might seek, and find—not an enigma but a small miracle, a fragment of bellezza, a leaf or a flower on the stream, ascending.

6                  

The restorers and conservators who’d come from overseas and worked as or alongside the angeli had their own reunion a few days later at La Pietra, Harold Acton’s villa, which was now owned by New York University. Nick Kraczyna had told me about it. He was excited. He was going to see people like Joe Nkrumah and Tony Cains for the first time in decades. I found a way to go along.

The Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU was sponsoring the event, and scholarly papers—some of them quite technical—would be presented. Nick would settle down Nkrumah and Cains and they’d reprise the tale of the totaled Volkswagen and Joe’s broken leg. But the formal point of the symposium was to examine the legacy of the flood as it applied to restorers and conservators. The book conservators formed the largest contingent, people from overseas who’d come to Florence’s libraries and had invented their profession in the process. The presiding genius of the entire operation, Peter Waters, had died the previous year, a victim of the asbestos tools he’d used in his work. His wife, Sheila, spoke in his stead without sentimentality or conceit. They’d done a good job. They had learned a lot.

In another session Marco Grassi, who’d pasted velinatura on the Vasari Last Supper, looked back with some amusement on what they’d all accomplished, given their age, inexperience, and naiveté, their capacity to slap together jerry-built solutions and recover from their own blunders. It had been an achievement merely to slog through the mud, the liquefied chaos that clung to your feet, hands, and entire body, that was always slowly, tirelessly laboring to pull you in and under.

Now they were all grown up: Grassi himself was a beautifully spoken, elegant gentleman who divided his time between Manhattan and Florence. These one-time angeli held positions of great responsibility, were dottori, professori, gran’ signori. But together they’d had this grimy golden youth. Afterward, lunch was served and people made plans to meet in the city that night for drinks and dinner, to talk into the night, to laugh and reminisce.

Then Joe Nkrumah took the podium. He’d always cut a large figure, physically and in the gravitational force of his character. Now the director of the Foundation for Contemporary Art in Accra, he’d come all the way from Ghana. He’d aged magnificently. Vested in a blue and gray boubou, he looked like a prophet or a king. He began in his customary manner, sly, jocund, and self-deprecating. And then he said, “Joe Nkrumah is a very angry man.” He repeated this twice more, and he laid into all of them, and especially into himself. “We can’t finish even one thing,” he continued. “Half our work is still awaiting completion. We couldn’t create an institution to finish it.” He shook his head. “If art is important, if culture is our soul, our identity . . .” His voiced ebbed into silence.

He began again. “So I’m angry. Forty years on, I can’t see much of what I—what we—did.” He shook his head again, as though he’d had a text he’d misplaced, or thrown away. “Why do we even care . . . to disturb the dead, to disturb the dead, if this is how we are—not finishing this work.” And he stepped off the dais and went back to his seat near Nick Kraczyna.

Afterward there was a presentation about loose vellum bindings, and another about the solubility of acrylic resins. Or I think they were. I was preoccupied. I couldn’t quite understand what Nkrumah had been so angry about, why he’d trailed dejection through the room amid all the fond nostalgia, the hard-earned ease of these people who’d saved so much. And statistically, he wasn’t right: I’d checked, and there were at most 25 percent of the Biblioteca Nazionale’s flooded books left to restore.

The next morning I went down to the river and crossed the Ponte Santa Trinità to a photographic exhibition at the Palazzo Vecchio. I’d seen Nick’s photographs—grainy, angular, and precipitate—and Zeffirelli’s film, with its gyres of water and floating cars and the bleak overcast of Burton’s voice. But these were David Lees’s photographs. They’d been enlarged to a massive scale and hung, illumined by pools of light, within a shadowy, vaulted room.

I’d seen them again and again over the last year, and I knew, of course, who David Lees was. So I must have known that his were the photographs by which I’d come to know about the flood when I was a boy: it went without saying. But I hadn’t seen it. It was a face I hadn’t recognized. And then, gazing at the Madonna poised on her delta of mud, I remembered.

In many ways the other photographs I’d seen were more immediate, and I suppose they gave a truer impression of what the flood had really been like: the disorder and filth, the unraveling of every normalcy and routine, the panic, misery, tears, and shrugs. But the profound impression I received from Lees’s photographs was of an eerie motionless silence, peace as far as the eye could see; Leonardo’s infinite water, now calm, and a bird settling upon a drifting tangle of bodies, an islet of stilled flesh.

It was terrible, or at least sad, and yet I might have just then been back in Minnesota forty years before, looking—languid and spread upon the sofa or the blue wool carpeting—at a magazine, seeing tragedy five thousand miles distant rendered into beauty, entering me, asking me to give it its due. It made me think of those forty years, and what I’d made of them, and I think then I knew a little of what Joe Nkrumah had been trying to say. In my life, in all the things I might have saved and remade, I hadn’t done the half of it, either.

I wanted to know everything about David Lees. I was sure he was dead, but I looked in our two-year-old telephone directory, and he was listed as residing just down the street from us, opposite the Piazza Santo Spirito. There was no answer. He’d been dead two years. But the catalog for the exhibition listed a Lorenzo Lees among the acknowledgments. Surely this was a relative and surely, given the unusual name—half Italian, half English—he could be tracked down.

I typed the name into an Internet search engine, but the only result that made any sense was on a site belonging to the Archdiocese of Westminster, the Roman Catholic see of London. The “Lorenzo Lees” listed there had conducted a catechism class at some point. It didn’t seem likely this was who I’d been seeking, someone off in England, teaching Sunday school. But I sent an e-mail, apologizing for the intrusion, but asking that in the remote event that this person was connected to David Lees to please get in touch.

I was still, all that while, also looking for Umberto Baldini. I knew, of course, a lot about his career as well as the odd shred of gossip but I wanted to get a feel for him; a sense of his motivations, this great man who’d saved—or destroyed—the Cimabue Crocifisso. There was nowhere left to go but to Ornella Casazza.

I’d avoided her until now; or, as I preferred to think, left her in peace. She might still be in mourning, and I’d been told repeatedly she was a difficult, opaque person. She’d talk shop a little, but she wouldn’t let you in.

Still, I had to try. I had Cristina Acidini and Bruno Santi to refer me, and just after New Year’s I had an appointment. Her office was in the Palazzo Pitti, across a cortile from Santi’s. I was nervous. Apparently she spoke English but would prefer not to. That was her right. We were meeting on her turf, not mine.

An assistant led me down yards of corridors to her office. It was frescoed and overlooked another smaller, more isolated cortile. Casazza rose from her chair, walked over to me, shook my hand with both of her hands, and smiled a winsome, blazing smile. By my calculation she should be sixty-three or sixty-four years old. She was beautiful; in fact, she was sexy. I would have done whatever she asked.

She’d been talking with an American-born colleague, perfectly bilingual, and it was agreed he’d stay and sort out any linguistic confusion over technical matters. I had a list of questions that would slowly narrow down to the matter of the Crocifisso, and the critics of its restauro. I began, and Casazza continued to smile. She would spread her arms and turn her palms upward, as though the answers were floating down from overhead like feathers and all she had to do was catch them. She’d offer an answer, and for good measure refer it to her colleague for confirmation. I sat, hunched over my notebook, nodding with canine avidity.

She was still raining down warmth on me, but nothing intimate about Baldini had come across the two-foot gap between us, still less about her and Baldini. I played the Mora card: a historian of restoration at the La Pietra Symposium had told me that people often referred to Baldini and Casazza in tandem with Paolo and Laura Mora—Cesare Brandi’s prize students and his successors at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome—as rival husband-and-wife teams of restauro. What did she think of their work? I asked. Casazza was kind and condescending: it was fine as far as it went, but ultimately it was subjective. It was distorted by the Moras’ reliance on their taste, by the limitations of Brandi’s theory. By contrast, she and Baldini had let Cimabue be their teacher, had followed his lead. They built a neutral bridge across the gaps from the artwork back to the viewer. It was like conducting a musical score: every conductor had an interpretation, but when the orchestra played Beethoven it was still Beethoven. But in Rome at the Istituto, with the Moras, it wasn’t Beethoven anymore.

And what of the critics of the Cimabue restauro? Chromatic abstraction was as valid now as it was then, Casazza told me. Since then, tests and studies they’d done with computers had confirmed the choices they’d made in applying Baldini’s theories. Today she would do the Cimabue, the Primavera, and the Brancacci—their three most important projects—exactly the same way they’d done them originally. There were no regrets, no second thoughts, no doubts.

We looked at some photographs I’d brought: in one, an unknown hand holding a brush was laying down tratteggio on the head of the Crocifisso. She’d never seen it before. I asked her to look closely and she bent down over the photograph. “Yes,” she said, “that’s my hand.” It was a discovery that seemed to please her. Then, as now, she was beautiful. Her hand might have been cast of silver, or of bronze.

She was a kind woman too—at least to me—and maybe Baldini had, in fact, been a kind man. As for their affair, their age difference, the way he was supposed to have eased her passage through exams and job competitions—well, this was Italy; and now I couldn’t say that I didn’t understand exactly why such things might have happened. He did what anyone might do when seized by overwhelming bellezza.

A few days later, I got an e-mail from London: “I am David Lees’ son,” it said. I could write back or we could talk on the phone.

When I telephoned Lorenzo Lees, he told me that as it turned out he was coming to Florence in a few days to arrange for the sale of his father’s old apartment. Lorenzo was a Catholic missionary in an innercity part of London and had accustomed himself to a modest way of life, but his twin brother in Rome had insisted that they realize the considerable profit the apartment would yield on the Florentine real estate market.

Later that next week I sat with Lorenzo in the apartment, unchanged from his father’s last occupation of it. It had the austere but expansive feel of an artist’s home or studio from some moment in the fifties, the white walls, geometric splashes of primary colors, and nubby, rough textures woven in earth tones. It could have been our house when I was a boy had we dared to be more bohemian, had we, I suppose, loved art more.

Lorenzo was, it turned out, precisely my age: my St. Paul with my mother had paralleled his Rome with his mother. He was frank with me about his life—or, for a long time, the lack of it—with his father; the things he’d missed, the things he imagined David had missed with Gordon Craig. But he was proud of them too, Craig and his internationally famous mother, Ellen Terry, David’s own fearless and tender aesthete mother, Dorothy, and David most of all. Lorenzo was a devout Catholic: he’d dedicated his life to the Church and to making a family of a kind neither he nor his father had ever known. The first time he mentioned he had ten children, I thought I misheard him. Yes, ten. I should come to London. I could meet them. That was where he had his father’s things: the negatives, the papers, the notebooks. I said I would try, maybe in March. He really seemed to want me to come, as though it would do me good, as though I needed saving.

7                  

The phrase “the religion of art” seems to have originated with Walter Pater, the Oxford don and aesthete who famously said that all art ought to aspire to the condition of music, and that life should aspire to the condition of art: “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame.” It was an imperative compelling enough to draw Dorothy Lees and thousands more to Florence. Perhaps it had moved me here too.

Nietzsche had taken the idea a little further: “Art raises its head where religions decline.” It’s a truth that can’t be proven, but the decline of religion in the nineteenth century did indeed parallel the rise of connoisseurship, aestheticism, and art tourism rather neatly. For myself, I would have said I was beyond that. Certainly when I was growing up, what I craved in art and music and idealism was a life of the spirit, a meaning that felt to me lost or never acquired in the first place. But as an adult, I’d found a middle way. I decided I did believe in God—or at least in something spiritual, some great numinous intention—and I did believe in beauty: one, in fact, was a sign, a revelation, of the other.

But on a morning in Florence in February I woke up and I didn’t believe in God anymore; or, rather, I had the belief but not the feeling of believing, which I suppose was to say that I had lost faith. I still had the idea of the divine, but couldn’t quite touch it, not to say see it. It had become an abstraction at a very great remove. The loss didn’t seem to make any great difference to me except when I thought of it. It was as though I’d been entertaining a great hope for a very long while—say, a windfall, an award, the perfect job—which had been in the end disappointed, but whose reality hadn’t quite sunk in.

That I should have felt this was odd, because on the principle just enumerated, I should by rights have been up to my neck in God because I was up to my neck in beauty. Maybe I needed to try a little harder. I should put art to the test and see if it actually did what I thought it was supposed to do. I went back to see the Cimabue Crocifisso. Cimabue’s purposes were strictly spiritual and in that regard even practical. That’s not to say the labor did not give him pleasure or despair, or that he wasn’t proud of it and pleased to think about what it would do for his reputation. But he’d made an object, a tool to effect Christian worship, prayer, fear, and consolation. As the Arno was a machine made to move water, the Crocifisso was a machine to move sinners to salvation. I had a feeling I would not be so easily converted. But maybe I would have a transcendent moment, or at least a powerful sense of “tactile values.” The beauty would turn me back onto the path whose track I’d lost.

I went to Santa Croce first thing in the morning so I could have the Crocifisso to myself, and I was indeed the only person in the refectory. But on the way, I stopped for a moment to look at the cross by Lippo di Benivieni, whose wood support Marco Ciatti had been able to preserve using his microtome saw technique. It was more striking, more compelling, than I’d remembered. Its Christ was an obviously young, even handsome man and perhaps because of that, he projected an innocence that could only produce a concomitant sense, in me at least, of the outrage and cruelty that had been perpetrated on his body. Mary and John, on either end of the horizontal spar, look shattered, their faces wrenched by grief. In the Benivieni there’s what Ruskin called the sweetness of Giotto in the rendering of Jesus; in the tender-limbed body, the way the toes of the right foot are curled around the left, as though to protect them, this one little thing, from harm. It moves you to pity, and perhaps to the thought that God might pity you.

After seeing the Benivieni, the Cimabue looked different to me. I couldn’t now say how many times I’d visited it in the last two years, never mind how many times I’d seen it in photographs. But now it seemed darker, stiller, more silent and cold than I recalled. Viewing it wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience. It wasn’t consoling or uplifting. What it manifested more than any other quality was the absolute deadness of Jesus. It seemed to enclose and hold fast the minute just after his last breath, his final heartbeat. Mary and John are not so much grieving as stunned; they’re still taking things in; the tears haven’t come yet. And the resurrection doesn’t even register as a possibility. It’s as though he’s swallowed death whole.

I was thinking that Cimabue’s Crocifisso wasn’t beautiful by any normal standard of beauty. Nor was it shocking or transgressive in the manner much contemporary art claims to be. Of course there were things in it that I might have called beautiful: the majestic arc of the body like a sickle moon, broad-hipped and rounded in the belly, feminine, almost fecund in its collapse. And there was his one surviving eye—God’s eye, you could say—that was also curved in the manner of the body, shut tight, not asleep, but exhausted beyond measure. There was not an ounce of life in the entire painting. This is the vastness of the Crucifixion, the painting said; the extent of the annihilation necessary for Christ to kill death. Now there’s nothing, no place to go. The next move belongs to God.

For me the overwhelming feeling was one of devastation, of loss and absence far beyond sadness or grief. The Crocifisso now simply stated, This is death; this is suffering pressed to and beyond its limit. No wonder the Arno, in its raging self-abnegation, came looking for this particular object and drowned it with such care. They were brothers under the skin.

Of course the meaning Francis and Cimabue intended only begins here: the rest of the story, life without end, followed from this absolute dying by Christ. You might as well embrace him, they would have said. That’s the next step, if you’re up for it. As if you had any alternative.

I didn’t know if I could go that far. I felt that the Crocifisso had, instead of offering me transcendent beauty—one standard definition of art—asked me to transcend beauty itself, to press beyond it; not necessarily to religion, but toward something very insistent in its demands; something emphatically real rather than hollow. As matters stood, I saw only darkness in the Cimabue. Perhaps Baldini’s restauro had made it darker still. I could see the chromatic abstraction at work. The two dominant colors in the painting—gold/yellow and blue—combined in the eye to make green in the gaps. Or that was what my eye did. The entire Crocifisso seemed to have a greenish cast, a hint of the sickly that perhaps suited its intention, that perhaps was there all the time.

The Cimabue was high up the wall, fastened from above by cables with which the whole cross could be raised to the ceiling should the Arno come again. Now, at worst, the flood could only nip at its heels. Consequently, you can’t inspect most of the surface. At the very foot of the cross, however, I could get a fairly good look at an infilled gap. The color—or rather what my eye was making of the patch—seemed a kind of algal brown, the hue more or less of mud. It took me a few moments to make out the hatching—it was that subtle—and I wondered if the work had been Casazza’s or Bracco’s. It was, as Baldini’s theory provided for, angled up to the left, northwestward, toward the sagging crescent of Christ’s leg.

So had they wrecked the Crocifisso? I couldn’t say. And had the Crocifisso, by way of its art or its example, exercised any kind of restauro on my faith? If it had—and I doubted that as I doubted everything—it meant to save me in a wholly confusing, unexpected way. It wanted me to go with it beyond art, which had already been as far as I thought I could go. But on either account, Baldini’s or mine, yes, the Cimabue was ruined. It had been ruined, I now understood, from the beginning.

I came out of the refectory into the light of the second cloister, the lawn deep green, shot through with pink and yellow roses. I heard a crackle of birdsong and for a moment—perhaps I was still under the influence of the Cimabue—I thought I saw books afloat on water, the maelstrom of paper that Casamassima had seen forty years ago, that the Franciscan brothers had had to navigate to enter the refectory. It was over in an instant, this vision: the flood had receded, ancient as Noah. Outside, in the piazza, tourists were milling, waiting to see the art. Women, immigrants who’d come here all the way from southeast Asia, were selling silk-screened scarves.

Giorgio Vasari had been a realist. He knew the kind of things people could and would say about one’s work, starting with his loathsome antagonist, Benvenuto Cellini. Or there was this, from an art historian four hundred years later referring to one of his paintings as “a Last Supper in a lifeless manneristic style. St. John is outrageously sprawled and the Judas is a poor borrowing from Sodoma . . . dull and undigested.” And he knew what mere time and nature could do, not to say a flood: l’acqua rintenerì di maniera il gesso . . . fece gonfiare il legname di sorte che tanto quanto se ne bagnò da piè si e scortecciato, “the water is absorbed by the gesso and makes the panel swell so that it’s soaked from the bottom and the surface peels off like bark.” He and his art had been through it all.

But now a great deal of attention was being lavished on him. The press of the twenty-first century had made him a painter of masterpieces, or perhaps it was really the flood, the Arno. When I went back to the Fortezza in the spring, three of the five panels of The Last Supper were missing from their cradle. The tests Marco Ciatti had wanted were finally under way.

In the lab he showed me panels 1 and 2, now mounted on upright supports so their surfaces could be laser-scanned millimeter by millimeter. Panel 2 was in the worst condition of any section of the painting: besides being fissured and rucked, it was two centimeters smaller than the paint that was supposed to be covering it. It was Judas’s panel. Somewhere under the velinatura, he was lurking, holding his body in that fey twisted pose Vasari had gotten from Sodoma. Before Ciatti could even think about separating the image and its mismatched support, they’d have to make a molded replica of the entire panel for the saw to track. And then there was the question of the saw itself, which would have to be custom-built at massive expense. It would be a formidable, even infernal machine: there was some question about whether Ciatti could obtain the necessary safety certifications that would allow his team to operate it.

But they were going forward regardless. On the central panel, number 3, they’d conducted tests to see if the velinatura could be removed and the paint underneath consolidated securely. They’d had to apply a solvent gel, let it sit for two weeks, and then gently work the paper free using only water and a fine brush. Once the velinatura was out of the way, loose and flaking paint had to be secured in place, using a syringe to inject threads of animal glue beneath the surface. All these procedures had worked as they’d hoped. They had a plan and three of the Fortezza’s best restorers plus two student assistants to carry it out. They also had, it seemed, some of the money that had been promised from Rome.

Ciatti took me over to see the results: I knew from the old black-and-white photographs that panel 3 was the center section containing the figure of Christ. John would be collapsed against Jesus on the right and, on the opposite side, Peter. After forty years of being ignored and shunted between cellars and storerooms, veiled in rice paper, I was going to see part of the uncovered Last Supper.

It was Peter I could see, Peter who’d surfaced from under the dirt and the mud, not perhaps good as new but very close to it. He was stunned as though lightning-struck, nearly falling over backward at hearing Jesus’ declaration that one of them would betray him. He was shocked, it seemed to me, but also simply affronted. He couldn’t imagine that one of them was capable of this.

But of course one of them was, and for not much money. And so was another: Peter himself, who would deny knowing Jesus three times in the next twenty-four hours. Judas was, you could argue, simply bad, playing his assigned role in the drama of redemption. But Peter’s betrayal was of another magnitude exactly because it was so ordinary, committed almost innocently by that most ordinary of the apostles. It was beyond his imagining that he might do such a thing, and then he did it twice more, willed and willfully, all the while mystified at himself.

Peter had done what anyone could have done and maybe would have done under the circumstances. As an evil it was inconsequential, but consciously shamefaced in execution, a mediocre, tawdry little thing. It was the kind of sin Vasari especially could understand: “I am as I can, not as I ought to be . . .”

I looked for a long while at Peter and the field of gray velinatura around him. The rest of the rice paper and Kleenex would soon be stripped away, although in restauro “soon” could mean five years. For now there was Peter, flabbergasted by an event we couldn’t yet entirely see; or perhaps he’s taken aback by where he finds himself, dirty but intact after forty years of sleep. As I moved away from the panel, I saw that some dirt had stuck to my sleeve. I was sure I’d never come in physical contact with the painting. Ciatti was under no obligation to let me see these things, and it went without saying he trusted that I would be careful around them. But there was the spot, the mark of my unwitting touching of what I was not supposed to touch. I was soiled by the same dried Arno mud as Judas and the rest of them who lived inside Vasari’s painting.

Ciatti saw me to the door. He had to take a telephone call and while I was waiting I noticed a bust near the entrance. It was carved by Pellegrino Banella, who had restored Donatello’s Maddalena. The subject was Ugo Procacci. Returning, Ciatti saw me looking at the statue, and we talked about Procacci and of Ciatti’s admiration for him. If he could be just a little bit like Procacci, he said, he’d consider his life a great success. He didn’t want to sound pretentious, but he was trying to run this laboratorio as Procacci would. Of course he was only human. We were all merely human, perhaps even the geniuses. One did what one could, and perhaps brushing up against all this beauty—devoting oneself to it—helped one to do a little better.

As we went toward the door, I mentioned the death of Umberto Baldini eight months before. Would there be a bust of him someday? Of course Banella was dead, but someone could doubtless attempt it. “Perhaps, perhaps,” Ciatti said. In Florence, at the Fortezza, eight months scarcely counted as time at all.

8                  

In March I went to London to see Lorenzo Lees. I telephoned him from the sidewalk outside my hotel. Where was I? he asked. Maybe he could pick me up. I looked behind me, hoping to see a street sign. But there was only a blue plaque. They’re everywhere in London, marking the former homes of historic figures. This one recorded that at this address in Barkston Gardens, Earls Court, lived Ellen Terry, actress, from 1889 to 1902. Ellen Terry was Lorenzo’s great-grandmother, the mother of Gordon Craig, the absentee father of Lorenzo’s absentee father, David. She’d moved on just as Dorothy Lees was embarking for Florence, for art’s sake and, later, love’s.

We decided it would be easier if I simply met Lorenzo at the church in south London where his wife was working. I took the underground to Brixton and arrived at the church, Our Lady of the Rosary, in advance of Lorenzo. At the back, in the sanctuary, there was a woman standing on a scaffold with a brush in her hand. She was painting a mural that ran fifteen feet up the wall and wrapped around either side of the altar. It was in the Greek style, the style from which Cimabue had decisively freed Italian art. The artist here in Brixton was painting an Anastasis, one of the principal images in the Eastern tradition, in which Christ was shown retrieving the dead from Hell, the event that follows what Cimabue had portrayed in the Crocifisso.

This painter was no Cimabue or even a Vasari. But there was a boldness to her lines, shapes, and colors that was compelling. You wanted to look, to go a little further with the image than you might first think. That was nothing negligible. In Florence, in the epochs I’d been studying, seeing an artist on a scaffold painting in a church would have been a nearly daily event. Today, he or she would likely be a restorer. But this little parish in a downtrodden part of London was an unlikely place for any kind of art at all. The painter, Lorenzo told me when he finally arrived, was his wife, Maurizia.

They’d lived in England for twenty years now, painting, catechizing, and doing good works, but they had remained thoroughly Italian. They wanted to speak Italian and when we got to their home in Peckham for lunch we would eat Italian, right down to debating the merits of long pasta versus short. The kitchen was presided over by an archetypal signora of immeasurable years who had also been caring for Maurizia and Lorenzo’s youngest child. When we sat down, there was an antipasto, a primo, a secondo, wine, and a dolce, all modest but correct. We were a long way from south London.

But in fact that London was just outside the door. In the last month there’d been a chain of murders two blocks away. A fifteen-year-old boy had been shot in his bed, and three others stabbed or shot within a few days by rival gang members. A neighbor told the BBC that Peckham was “England’s Bronx.” I asked Lorenzo if they’d considered leaving. He said they had “no plans.”

Lorenzo showed me what he wryly called the “archives,” a dead space at the top of a stairway crammed with files and boxes. Most of his father’s negatives were here as well as an extensive hoard of Gordon Craig memorabilia. Among the latter were wooden figures, beautifully carved and worn by handling, that Craig used to block his actors and build mock-ups of his stage designs. Maybe I would like to take one? But I declined, blind to what Lorenzo was offering. I was here to talk to him about his father and to look at his photographs. I’d hoped there might be unpublished shots of the flood and the subsequent restorations.

Lorenzo stood on the top step and handed boxes and sleeved transparencies back to me. We found a set of slides taken in 1972 that I’d never seen before, but other than that there were no other flood and restauro photographs. Then I noticed a book that looked familiar and I asked Lorenzo to hand it to me. It was a Time-Life book from the late fifties called The World’s Great Religions, and we’d had a copy when I was a boy. I leafed through it and I stopped at a photograph from the interior of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. A silver star was set into the stone floor and it was exactly here, the story went, that Jesus was born. I told Lorenzo that I remembered seeing that photograph. In fact, I’d been fascinated by it. It contained for me at age ten or eleven the notion that the son of God could be born in so particular a place; a spot that could be touched and photographed, an intersection of the transcendent and the concrete that for me seemed to constitute the marvelous, the beautiful, and the holy. It was probably this photograph as much as anything that had launched me into that brief bout of faith in 1966 that had lasted until a little while after the flood.

“My father took that,” Lorenzo said, and although as David was Life’s specialist in such subjects I shouldn’t have been surprised, this fact too seemed a marvel. It wasn’t a coincidence or a happenstance, but another point on a matrix that was becoming an image or at least a frame. Inside it I was beginning to see not just the flood or Florence or its art but my own life. Lorenzo asked me if I wanted anything from the archive, a photograph or a print. I took a 35mm slide, shot on what David liked to call “mia amica Nikon,” from the 1972 sleeve we’d found. It was the bare cross of the Cimabue, leaning against a wall in the Fortezza, stripped of its canvas and paint as it had been shown in Baldini’s exhibition. It was a transitory, temporary phase in the Crocifisso ’s life, its heart laid bare, halfway between its drowning in the Arno and its resurrection ten years after, still precisely itself. The photograph itself was beautiful, as beautiful as the cross, as beautiful now as the one of Bethlehem had been once upon a time. Maybe it would lead me somewhere, to art or faith or something more.

I went back downstairs with Lorenzo. Maurizia and the signora were tending the baby. The child, I realized, was wearing tiny plastic spectacles, or rather the women were attempting to make him wear them, since he pulled them off—seemingly with great delight—every time they were put on him. Lorenzo and Maurizia had named him John Paul after the recently deceased pope. The fervency of their Catholicism made me a little uncomfortable: the enormous family; the cheerfully accepted privation of living in a blighted, dangerous neighborhood; the setting aside of larger ambitions they might have had for her painting and his own photography; and this blind or half blind child. None of it belonged to what I believed to be my life, my world of art and books and beautiful things.

John Paul seemed happy enough, as happy in fact as any baby I’d seen. I asked Lorenzo how well he could see with his glasses. They didn’t know: there was no way to test a child so small. He might see blurs and shapes, or just colors, or merely light and dark—chiaroscuro. Just then, he squealed, the avian shriek that babies produce for a few months before real words come. He’d seen something, and the feeling it gave him—the thing it pulled out of him—had brought him to ecstasy, to a vision, a depth, that only he could take the measure of.

Back in Florence I went to see Giovanni Menduni at L’Autorità di Bacino del Fiume Arno one last time. He’d agreed to take me around to some places in the city that had been important to him at the time of the flood. As a high government official, he possessed that most envied of Florentine treasures, a parking permit that allowed him to drive and leave his car almost anywhere. When the next flood came, he’d enjoy, of course, the most privileged level of access.

So we drove to Santa Croce. He could have gone straight into the piazza and left his car in front of the Basilica if he had a mind to, but instead he found an ordinary, legal parking place alongside the exterior of the second cloister and the Biblioteca Nazionale. I wondered if he ever became tired of coming here, of seeing the church, the piazza, and the statue of Dante, Dante’s face fixed in a severe, perturbed expression as though he were angry at nothing so much as Florence itself.

We turned right at the northeast corner of the piazza into Via San Giuseppe. A few blocks down was the old Pestalozzi academy, which had finally been restored and put back in use as an ordinary public school. Menduni asked the woman in the vestibule if we could come in, gently, shyly, rather as I suppose he had offered his help to the despairing custodian forty years before, rastrello in hand. He wanted to show me the giardino—what I would call the playground—where so many of what now seemed to him to be the happiest moments of his life had transpired. It had once been the garden of Santa Croce’s monastery, on the far edge of the city, almost rural. It still enjoyed a view of the back of the Basilica that few people had ever seen.

We came out and continued right down Via San Giuseppe. I think Menduni was trying to give me a better, longer view of his old school, but my eye was struck and held by a plaque on a wall just ahead of us. It had been installed very recently, only a few months ago, and it marked Azelide Benedetti’s apartment. She had been powerless, the plaque said, una che deve morire e che vede la morte avvincinarsi, “one who must die and sees death approach.” She had not been a hero, but only a witness, like the Cimabue Crocifisso that still—once more—hung seventy-five yards from her barred window.

We walked back down the street in the opposite direction, past the intersection with the Borgo Allegri, and Menduni showed me Mayor Bargellini’s old palazzo. Members of his family still lived there, he told me. The front was as badly defaced with graffiti as any building I’d seen in Florence: supersaturated red, blue, green, orange, and purple on a buff wall; inanities—beautiful in a certain vivid way—frescoing the house of Florence’s great contemporary Christian humanist. Up the street was the old site of the Casa del Popolo, now vacated. Politics in Florence were, as Machiavelli knew, eternal in form, but subject to changes in substance. Across the street from the former Casa, a cortile now housed a mosque and on its door there was a poster expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

On our way back to his car we stopped again in the Piazza Santa Croce, the epicenter of the flood, the bottom of the spiral of the inferno of 1966. “You have to ask yourself,” said Menduni, “why, knowing what they know, people keep rebuilding here, knowing that every hundred and fifty years there will be a deluge.” He paused, as though the people walking by or sitting in the piazza might be the very ones who’d made this decision. “It seems irrational, but perhaps it’s not. Maybe people weighed the benefits of being here against the cost of losing half or a third of it every century, and they decided it’s worth it—to be here, on the Arno. There’s tradition and pride, but Florentines are practical people.”

Maybe, I thought, far from destroying their community, the floods were part of what makes Florentines who they are. I remembered what the politician Enrico Mattei had once said: “The most divided, most discordant, most quarrelsome people in the world found themselves united, brothers, in the immense pity of Florence.”

Back at his office Menduni showed me some photographs. He loved computers and had become extraordinarily adept at scanning images and magnifying and analyzing them. “Look at this,” he said. It was a map from Leonardo’s Book of Water. Menduni zoomed in until we could see the finest lines, the threads of the smallest cross-hatching. He pointed. “Here’s Florence. Now look at this. I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed it before.” I could see what seemed to be the Arno entering and leaving the spot he’d indicated. But to either side of it the line of the river divided, forked into two branches, and reunited at the other edge.

“He wanted to put a moat around Florence,” Menduni said. “Bisect the river and have flood control and defense in one stroke.” He shook his head in amazement. “That’s a pretty extraordinary idea.”

In the excitement of hearing about this discovery, I realized I’d forgotten to ask if he ever got a Hammond B-3. No, he never had, he replied. And now they were out of production, collectors’ items, hair-raisingly expensive. Seeing the wreck of the B-3 he’d coveted dragged out into the mud of the street had been his initiation into loss and disappointment—Virgil and Dante’s lacrimae rerum, “the tears of things”—back in 1966. But look at everything he’d learned from the Arno by not having it.

I had not given up looking for Umberto Baldini. The memories of the people who’d known him had gone fuzzy or, I suspected, consciously protective of his reputation. But what of the end of his life? What had he done in those last few years of his life besides read examinations and essays? Something would have been possessing him, even in his senescence, an object for his outsized ambition, energy, and intelligence, probably right up to the moment he’d gone to the hospital. It would be, of course, a restauro.

And I found there was indeed a final Baldini restoration: the frescoes Giorgio Vasari had painted for himself in his house in Santa Croce, frescoes that told the allegorical stories of the arts he’d practiced and depicted the faces of the artists he worshipped. The sala of Casa Vasari was, even more than his Last Supper, his lost masterwork.

When the last of Vasari’s heirs died 113 years after his death, the house was deeded in accordance with his will to a lay religious order based on Arezzo. The brothers sold off the furnishings and art and the house itself passed into the hands of several owners, most recently the Marrocchi family in 1842. Casa Vasari had undergone considerable alteration over four hundred years, but the sala had remained untouched. No one except the Marrocchis had seen the frescoes for 150 years but any restorer would have correctly surmised that they had deteriorated, perhaps badly. Baldini knew of the frescoes’ existence, but it was during his retirement—when he became president of the Fondazione Horne, just down the street from the Casa—that he was in a position to act. In 2002 preliminary tests and evaluations were begun in conjunction with the Istituto in Rome. Beyond the expected grime, in places the frescoes had cracked or detached from the wall. The Arno had never reached the height of the sala, but there was extensive damage from water and damp.

Baldini’s wherewithal was still intact: the latest technology—computer scanning and spectography as well as acoustic and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging—from the best-equipped laboratories was lugged up the deep stairwell of the Casa. Cleaning and restoration were begun later—stacco, the equivalent for fresco of trasporto, would be necessary in places—and was continuing the summer Baldini died. Someday, although no one can yet say when, the sala will be open to viewing by small groups.

So it was Vasari—Vasari painted by Vasari; Vasari flanked by Cimabue and Leonardo, watched over by Michelangelo; Vasari’s private, even secret gallery of Vasaris—that was Umberto Baldini’s final restauro. I stood outside the Casa on a searing afternoon at the beginning of the summer after the fortieth anniversary of the flood, 435 years after Vasari painted the frescoes, the last works he completed with his own hand. I was frustrated. I’d been trying for six weeks to get permission to go inside, to see them, but the day before I’d been formally refused. Until the restauro was definitively completed, there could be no visitors. The shutters would stay fastened against the blaze of light streaming down the Borgo from the Piazza Santa Croce. “We cannot confer eternal life on paintings and statues and frescoes,” Baldini had told an interviewer once. But for the indefinite future, the sala and its frescoes would belong only to Vasari, to Baldini, and the great men they had loved and devoted themselves to, their immortal intimates and brothers in art.

Nick Kraczyna and I were having coffee in the Caffé Ricci in the Piazza Santo Spirito. If we’d gone outside, I would have been in sight or at least easy reach of almost everything that had mattered to me for the last two years in Florence, to say nothing of Nick’s forty-five: the piazza, of course, and Brunelleschi’s church, and, beyond it, the great river; the river in which Brunelleschi’s freighter of stone for the Duomo had foundered, whose hulk had so possessed Leonardo’s imagination when he was a boy, as David Lees’s photographs had possessed mine. And then, just beyond, its cities, Florence and Firenze.

That last pair did not make a distinction that Nick would much recognize, although it was still very real to me. He’d been in and out of this neighborhood since he was twenty, eating ribollita, drinking its tight-knit wine, and buying charcoal alongside people whose children had long since moved away. But he’d stayed. Unlike me and the line of English and American expatriates I felt descended from, Nick was an artist—not an aesthete, a scholar, a connoisseur, or a tourist—and for him there was no other place but this Florence, city of makers.

Here, he was midway between the Brancacci and the Pontormos in Santa Felicità. And here, for me, were Bernard Berenson’s first lodgings in Florence looking down on the piazza, the Brownings’ apartment a block away, Claire Clairmont’s a little farther down the Via Romana, Dorothy Lees’s tower by the Ponte Vecchio, and, on the Bellosguardo hill beyond, the villa where Henry James had lived. And over the river, always the river, were the homes of the Shelleys, the hotels of Ruskin and Forster, and the cellars that vibrated beneath Frederick Hartt’s room during his first flood.

We’d both be leaving Florence soon, Nick for a year’s teaching in America, a place that was now as “abroad” for him as any other. But then he had always been a refugee, except for here. And I was going home, even if after all this time here I was a little less sure of what constituted “home,” just as I was about faith.

We talked, of course, about the flood. Did he still think it was, as he liked to say, the “monumental” moment in his life? He was now sixty-seven years old and he’d seen a lot of things. But yes, it still was. He’d felt, in those minutes on the crumbling parapet of the Lungarno, both entirely present and entirely unrooted, like Icarus first launching himself. Perhaps that roaring surge of time contained, ecstatically, the moment before the moment Cimabue had fixed in perpetuity on his Crocifisso; the instant Peter is about to enter emerging from the velinatura of The Last Supper.

I asked Nick what he’d been working on lately. He was very excited about the multiplate color etching process he’d invented and been teaching to students from around the world. But what about Icarus? He said he hadn’t done much with Icarus in the last few years. He’d painted a huge outdoor mural in the Czech Republic in 2002, but nothing since. You had to wait for Icarus to come to you like you had to wait for these once-in-a-century deluges. The Pietà motif had come back for a while a few years ago—insisted on being worked on right now—and some other variation would doubtless present itself soon. Icarus was, after all, always and everywhere trapped in the labyrinth, trying to escape through his devices and fabrications. Weren’t we all? We all wanted so much and would do so much, so strangely and unpredictably, to gain it.

So we’d talked about the flood and we’d talked about art. There was a pause and then Nick said, “Here’s a puzzle, a labyrinth. The river’s flooding. And there’s a baby and there’s a Leonardo painting floating down it. Which do I save?”

I spread my arms apart, palms up, in the Italian gesture that can mean “Who knows?” or “Suit yourself,” or indicate several varieties of resignation. It’s not, I realized, much different than Mary’s posture in David Lees’s mudflat photograph of Santa Croce.

Nick looked at me. “But you think you know what I’d answer, don’t you?” And I thought, yes, I do. Because there’s ordinary life and it’s good and ought to be respected, but then there is also more, much more than we can imagine, beauty that runs on forever. There’s Firenze and then there is Florence.

“But you’d be wrong,” I heard Nick saying. “And you know why? Because, all right, there’s a Leonardo floating away. But suppose the baby is the next Leonardo and there’s all this work he’s going to do? Suppose he’s even better than Leonardo? You weigh all that, and you save the baby.”

Nick seemed pleased to have confounded me. Still, I thought, suppose the baby is John Paul Lees, who can’t even see, or scarcely at all? But who knew what he might be or do? It was beyond imagining. So any of us, really, was worth a Leonardo. Ruskin—who knew almost nothing of ordinary people or the real world, who lived from beauty to beauty—said, “You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better.” You should look, but you should also see. You should pay attention, render creation its due.

So there is the city and the river, what people make and lose and what survives; and then there is the beauty of it. Here is where we begin.