Talking Location With … Barbara Boyle – PIEDMONT
Five Top Titles Set Around the Great Florence Flood of 1966
28th October 2024
Five Top Titles Set Around the Great Florence Flood of 1966, The flood took the lives of 101 people and annihilated millions of masterpieces – from rare books to artistic masterpieces. It was the worst flood since 1557. A cohort of volunteers descended on the city – angeli del fango (Mud Angels) managed to rescue many pieces which underwent conservation and restoration but even today there is still more restoration to be undertaken.
We have brought together five top titles that touch upon the devastating events of that day.
The Flood by David Hewson
This is a dazzling Italian mystery, rich in intrigue and dark secrets, from an internationally bestselling crime writer at the height of his powers. Florence, 1986. A seemingly inexplicable attack on a church fresco of Adam and Eve brings together an unlikely couple: Julia Wellbeloved, an English art student, and Pino Fratelli, a semi-retired detective who longs to be back in the field. Their investigation leads them to the secret society that underpins the city: an elite underworld of excess, violence and desire. Seeped in the culture of Tuscany’s most mysterious city, The Flood takes the reader on a dazzling journey into the darkness in Florence’s past: the night of the great flood in 1966…
A Time of Mourning by Cristobal Kent
When a young English girl goes missing from among Florence’s hard-drinking, high-living community of foreign art students, at first ex-policeman, good husband and newly private detective Sandro Cellini is unwilling to see any connection with his investigation of the suicide of an elderly Jewish architect.
But as he looks more closely into the circumstances of Claudio Gentileschi’s death the connections between the cases multiply, and Sandro’s first case turns out to be darker and more complex than he could have imagined…
The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga
In 1966 the Arno River in Florence floods its banks causing hug devastation to stored artworks, and antique books. As a book conservator Margot Harrington flie in – along with many other volunteers – to add expert help in the conservation of fine art. They are known as the “Mud Angels”. She finds her way to a Carmelite convent where she discovers a book, bound within a book of erotic drawings. She is charged in secret, and not directly, to find the highest bidder for these drawings by the abbess, so the convent might supplement its meagre income. This is the story of her quest to conserve this masterpiece, her love affair and the trials of those working under duress and with limited means to preserve as many items as possible for posterity.
Florence: An Ordeal by Water by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
To showcase this wonderful book, we commissioned the writer and art historian Vanessa Nicolson to pen a new introduction – she lives in both Florence and Kent, and is the author of the brilliant novel Angels of Mud, which is set in 1940s London and 1960s Florence, and tells the story of the aftermath of the floods.
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor was a recently retired American living in Florence in 1966. She remained there to witness the flood and its aftermath, including the days of isolation without light, food, water that followed the initial disaster.
Standing, incredulous, at the window of her pensione on the morning of 4th November 1966, Kathrine saw the the brown torrent of the river Arno – thick with flotsam, oil drums, cars, chairs, trees – rising into the streets. Her infinitely moving diary of the days of the flood, and those that followed, detail how the citizens of Florence strove against the choking sea of mud that engulfed their homes, possessions, shops and art.
The author is perhaps most well-known for her 1938 novella – the international bestseller Address Unknown – a haunting tale written on the eve of the Holocaust which predicted the full horrors of Nazism.
The Forger and the Thief by Kirsten McKenzie
FIVE STRANGERS IN FLORENCE, EACH WITH A DANGEROUS SECRET. AND AN APOCALYPTIC FLOOD THREATENING TO REVEAL EVERYTHING.
A wife on the run, a student searching for stolen art, a cleaner who has lined more than his pockets, a policeman whose career is almost over, and a guest who should never have received a wedding invite. Five strangers, entangled in the forger’s wicked web.
In a race against time, and desperate to save themselves and all they hold dear, will their secrets prove more treacherous than the ominous floodwaters swallowing the historic city?
Dive into a world of lies and deceit, where nothing is as it seems on the surface…
Enjoy your books touching on The Great Flood of 1966 in Florence!
Tony for the TripFiction Team
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