The âMud Angelâ volunteers rescue artworks in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, 1966
âOvernight on 4 and 5 November 1966, the River Arno broke over its banks and flooded Florence, leaving one ton of mud for every person in the city and devastating the Renaissance cityâs artistic and historical treasures. Churches, museums and libraries, all filled with works of art, were inundated with mud, to a depth in some places of 22ft. Young people, arriving from across the Continent, immediately began showing up to help. They became known to the Florentines as gli angeli del fango, âthe Mud Angelsâ.
Throughout the winter of 1966-67, young volunteers kept arriving to help clean up Florence. Many of these were Italian, but a significant number came from further afield. They cleaned mud out of the Basilica di Santa Croce, carried priceless paintings out of the Uffizi galleries and brought food and fresh water to the elderly Florentines trapped in their upper-floor apartments. These youthful workers were not organised, nor had they been recruited. They simply turned up. Young Europeans dropped what they were doing and boarded trains or drove south. Many had already been on the road, backpacking around Europe, and simply rearranged their itinerary to spend time in Tuscany.
There was a tremendous turnover in the winter months. Some Mud Angels stayed a few days, others a few weeks. They listened to the latest music while working, smoked cigarettes on their breaks and had only a little energy left for carousing at night. Because of the polyglot nature of the young workers, the archivists and preservationists had to devise a colour-coded card system to track and process each item. It is unclear just how many Mud Angels there were in total, or even exactly where they had come from. There were probably only a few thousand of them at most, yet, given their mythic status in Italy, one would think the number was ten times that.
Mireille Bazin from the northern French city of Reims came down with 30 other art students during their holiday break. Another French visitor, William Michaut, commented that âdespite the language barrier, we lived in intense communionâ. Ignacio Serrano Garcia from Valladolid in Spain said that he and the other Mud Angels came to Florence out of a sense of duty to its great cultural heritage, while Riccardo Lanza from Milan recalls the harmony among the young cohorts:
âIt was something already present in our generation ⊠with more or less means, [we] had travelled in Italy and abroad and had often relied on the solidarity between us.â
The Mud Angels of 1966 were an expression of the internationalist instincts, transnational travel and generational solidarity that had developed out of the new-found postwar mobility of the youth of western Europe. In the decade and a half after the Florentine Mud Angels, mass youth travel in Europe developed into the kind of cultural form of travel that flourishes today, complete with rail passes, guidebooks and backpacks. Contact between young Europeans grew, helping to build new connections across borders.â [source]
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