The Uffizi, a Year After

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THE notes of Verdi's Requiem fade away into the night air and the Martinella on Palazzo Vecchio begins to toll. It is answered in turn by the bell of the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore -- the religious united to the secular. Only on solemn and exceptional occasions is the Martinella rung, to call the partisans in 1944, in 1966 when the River Arno broke its banks flooding the city, and again now. Piazza della Signoria is illuminated by thousands of lighted tapers. The crowds wait in silence for the last reverberations of the bells to echo over the Piazza as their minds go back to May 27th last year when, at this same moment, at one o'clock in the morning, a vast explosion shook the fabric of the whole of the centre of Florence. Its centre was the Torre dei Pulci. The family asleep on the top floor were killed outright, thirty people were wounded, untold damage was caused to the church of S. Stefano, to Via Lambertesca and the whole of the west wing of the Uffizi Gallery.

While the staunch Florentines reacted courageously, working tirelessly day and night to face the situation of emergency, finding temporary shelter for the homeless, clearing the debris, rescuing the two hundred and fifty year old collection of important agricultural documents and 42,000 volumes of agricultural history which were housed in the …