Paper

“The archives were flooded up to the level of the third shelf all the way round the Uffizi. As the water receded the manuscripts were left in a huge deposit of mud and there have been chain gangs of  two and three hundred students formed to pass them out, the damaged material included the Deliberazioni of the Capitani del Popolo and the Conventi soppressi. The latter group has been taken in trucks to the tobacco  drying places in Perugia  where it is hoped there will be enough students to interleave them before they dry. The manuscripts of the Opera del Duomo and of Santa Croce  and of the Conservatory of Music were very badly damaged and the most valuable ones have gone to the Vatican for restoration. The Nazionale was the worst hit and during the height of the flood had four to six meters of water in a raging torrent in various parts of the building. The whole ground floor is destroyed and the catalogues of the Magliabechiana and the Palatina flooded into the street. Many of the catalogue volumes can be saved with careful work. In the basement and buried in mud were all the folio volumes of the  Magliabechiana, the whole of the Palatina, the whole of the Miscellanea and the entire collection of newspapers running from the unification of Italy. These last have been completely ruined.”

Letter from Myron Gilmore to Felix Gilbert and Paul Kristeller, 14 November 1966
(CRIA VIT 05.09.370).

“Grave as is the damage to the Florentine artistic inheritance, it is less serious to the future of Florence as a cultural center than the destruction that was sustained by the libraries and archives. The attention of the world has not unnaturally focused on the Cimabue crucifix. What  happened to archives and libraries, however, means the interruption of the life of the Florentine scholarly community.”

“The Biblioteca Nazionale suffered a disaster such as few libraries, if any, in history have encountered. The entire ground floor and the two floors below were flooded with a raging torrent which twisted metal stacks and overturned desks and catalog drawers leaving behind a deposit of slimy mud which in the lower floor was as high as a meter and a half."

Myron P. Gilmore,"Progress of Restoration in Florence," 
Renaissance Quarterly, 20 (1967), pp. 100-102.