‘No!’ the old carabiniere roared, pushing him back. ‘I never liked this stuck-up little prick. He thinks he’s better than us. Smarter than us. If he feels he’s got the right to race over to his pretty little wife, then let him go. She’ll be upstairs watching all this shit like the rest of us. Waiting…’
‘I don’t feel better,’ Fratelli murmured, shaking himself free of Cassini’s grip. ‘Or smarter.’
But you’re wrong about the flood, he thought. He knew that somehow. Felt it in the cold damp in his feet. Smelled it in the stinking, fetid reek from beyond the window.
It would be several weeks before the Tuscan authorities managed to assemble the first accurate chronology of the disaster that engulfed Florence that night. There were more important things to do. Count the dead. Reconnect power lines and telephone cables, water supplies and transport networks. Bring life back to a city that had briefly stepped outside the twentieth century and found itself thrust into a shapeless, primeval past. After a while, when the scale of the catastrophe was obvious, came the task of directing the influx of ‘mud angels’, volunteers who flew from around the globe to help rescue the priceless objects now buried beneath an ocean of stinking mire.
Yet, whatever Pino Fratelli’s inner eye told him at times, this was a natural event, a chain of unfortunate incidents; each insignificant in itself, but turned into a terrible and devastating progression of violent physical disorder by their actions upon each other, like dominoes tipping over in an accidental chain.
The rains began three days before, heavy and constant. By the third of November the two dams that served the region, in Valdarno, south-east of the city, were already overflowing, dispatching two thousand square metres of water down the valley towards the city. Cellars in the lowest-lying area, Santa Croce, began to flood before midnight, cutting off power and mains water. Heating oil installations were swamped, garages found their underground storage tanks inundated. Sewerage systems were breached by the force of the current. Soon the Arno was a rank and noxious mix of rainwater, mud, raw sewage and black oil, rising all the time.
At two a.m., the slender Mugnone stream, a tributary that rose near Fiesole, burst its banks and flooded the Cascine Park on the right, northern bank of the Arno, beyond the densely populated centre. Though none in the heart of Florence knew it at the time, this single act sealed the city’s fate, allowing the flood waters to encircle the entire population of the centro storico; almost seventy thousand people crammed into an area little more than eleven square kilometres in size.
As the downpour continued, engineers in the Valdarno began to fear for the integrity of the two dams there and took the fateful decision to release yet more water into the torrent headed northwards. Minutes later the Arno breached the entire length of the Lungarno Cellini by San Niccolò. An hour on, the flood burst over the right bank around the Lungarno Acciaoli on the opposite bank. Within ninety minutes the main arteries into the city were turbulent rivers, not roads any more. Cars and trucks floated on the thrashing current. Furniture, washing, prams and rubbish bins raced along the streets at speeds approaching forty kilometres an hour.
When day broke on a city that was largely unrecognizable even to those who’d spent their lives within its boundaries, Santa Croce found itself under three metres of water. In the famous basilica, filthy water lapped against the stone tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli, despoiled Giotto’s precious frescoes, the priceless crucifix of Cimabue, centuries of much-loved painting and statuary. Almost on the stroke of eight, waves the height of two men battered down the doors of the Museum of the History of Science in the Piazza dei Giudici by the river next to the Uffizi. Before the hour was out, the square around the Duomo itself was inundated, with such force that the water broke through the gates of the Baptistery and covered Ghiberti’s beloved panels, the ‘Gates of Paradise’, in rank, corrosive mud and muck.
Still the flood grew, until at one point the Piazza della Signoria was six metres deep in swampy filth that lapped at the shins of the statue of David and ran over the ramp of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Cellini’s terrifying bronze Perseus stood there, plinth submerged, like an avenging angel rising from a squalid quagmire.
All this time the city waited, knowing the monster that had invaded their sleepy winter idyll must at some stage begin to shrink back and start to die. Yet at four that afternoon, as night began to fall on a dreadful day that none who experienced it would forget, the Arno and its associated sewage was at its highest, turning vast swathes of the city into a brown and putrid lagoon.
By then the men of the Borgo Ognissanti Carabinieri station had been working slowly, patiently, in the streets, through all the daylight hours without pause, without direction much of the time. Mid-morning the handful of boats that were stored along the riverfront were coming into use. Marrone commandeered as many as his men could handle. Communication was still impossible. No phone, no electricity, no radio. All they could do was respond to the community around them, people who were scared for the most part and, in the case of the sick and elderly, in need of physical aid as well.
The arguments between Fratelli and his colleagues ceased the moment the scale of the catastrophe became fully visible. With the gradual acquisition of some means of local transport, the men in the station began to row down streets where they usually drove their squad cars, calling out to the houses, telling people to stay where they were. For the whole of that day Fratelli found himself partnered with a genial cadet, Ludovico Ducca, a determined young man full of energy and good cheer, even in the most exasperating of circumstances. The two of them formed an immediate bond as they patrolled the waterlogged city centre looking for those in trouble. In the Ognissanti Hospital Fratelli and the muscular Ducca helped elderly and infirm patients to safety on the higher floors. Two babies were born there that day, and the young carabiniere looked a little shocked when one mother, a woman he’d carried up the staircase in his arms, asked for his first name and promised to pass it on to her infant son.
When there was time they comforted the distraught, the terrified, the angry. Told a few that this was not the end of the world. Not a divine judgement on a wicked city, the kind of horror once foretold by Savonarola from the pulpit of the Duomo. It was just rain, a lot of it, and soon the waters would disperse, leaving Florence to recover its glories from the mud and filth, and one day welcome back the warmth of the sun.
Around three in the afternoon, Fratelli and Ludovico Ducca found an old man dead in his kitchen, floating on the brown tide, in a terraced house two streets from the station. A heart attack, they thought. Not that there was any chance to check. Fratelli gazed at this corpse, knowing there was precious little he could do except make it secure and decent. Ducca was silent, shaken, his pleasant face bloodless for the first time that day. Later Fratelli was to discover he’d only joined up two months before and this was the first dead body he’d seen. There was no time for such considerations then, though it did occur to Fratelli that at this moment Florence was, as he’d said in the heated argument with Marrone, quite without rule, without law, without any sense of formal order. The people they met astonished him in their humanity, their courage, their self-sacrifice, as did the relentless and seemingly inexhaustible Ducca. The healthy gave way to sick, the thirsty to the thirstier. Already teams were being assembled to make their way to the worst-affected areas when a route became clear and, if there were no more people to be helped, to put their shoulders to turning the city back towards some kind of secure normality.