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National Geographic : 1967 Jul
Contents
Thus it was no ordinary alluvial flow that began to swamp classical Florence, but a thick slime of liquid mud bearing black rivers of oil, carcasses of animals, and the roiling contents of sumps and sewers, the very matter of Dante's Inferno. Where small piazzas open along the north ern bank, the river poured in at 40 miles an hour. At the Piazza dei Cavalleggeri, it formed a wide brown waterfall spilling tons of mud and debris directly into the basement stacks of one of Europe's richest libraries, the Biblio teca Nazionale Centrale (foldout, page 12). Equivalent to our Library of Congress, the Nazionale is Italy's largest library, containing more than three million volumes. The miles of shelving in the path of the river held several important collections-the most notable those bequeathed by Magliabechi in 1714 and the Palatina collection donated in 1771. The stacks also held hundreds of thousands of bound newspapers and journals-one of the prime sources for modern Italian history. In all, more than a million and a half volumes disappeared under the tide (page 25). A few minutes' walk downstream, Dr. Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli, the attractive scholar who directs the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, was sleeping in its ground-floor apartment. "My husband was in Brazil," she told me, "so I worked late and stayed in the apartment here. I heard a rushing sound, and when I opened my eyes, water already had reached my bed. When I opened this window..." she held her hand level with the sill, "the river was here." Appalled, she began to carry upstairs what she could of the museum's irreplaceable col lections-original instruments used by found ers of modern chemistry, medicine, and physics. But the waters mounted until they
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