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At a memorable meeting in Palazzo Pitti, attended by all the chief Superintendency persoimel and by the German military authorities. Anti was convinced that it was materially impossible to carry out his orders, for the Germans declared themselves unable to provide any trucks or gasoline, and the Italians had none. It was the unanimous agreement of those present that the works of art should stay where they were or, in case of direst necessity, should be brought to Flor- ence. An official report made to us by Comm. A little surprised by the abrupt question, I answered that there were indeed works of art of great importance at Montagnana, com- ing from the galleries and museums of the State, but that according to agree- ments previously made between the General Direction of Fine Arts and the office of Colonel Langsdorff" it was decided, as in the case of the other deposits, to remove nothing, unless in case of urgent danger, and then only to transport the paintings to Florence and not beyond the Apennines.
A few days later he communi- cated to me that he had been advised by a mihtary unit that paintings had been taken by truck from the deposit of Montagnana to a village twenty kilometers south of Modena, a village which later information identified as Marano. German equivalent of our mfaa. Langsdorff ar- rived in fact on July 17 and I informed him of everything, asking him to try to find out at once where the precious paintings had gone and, as soon as pos- sible, to bring them back to Florence.
Langsdorff asked me for a memorandum with a list of the pictures w'hich were at Montagnana; when, however, I brought it to the Hotel Excelsior where the Colonel had been staying — and this was the nineteenth of July — I found that he had left Florence a few hours before.
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In fact, that afternoon the German military and civilian authorities began to leave the city. What neither Poggi nor Anti knew was that Langsdorff, on the same day as his solemn agreement with the Italians in the Palazzo Pitti, wired to the Ger- man Military Government headquarters, for the information of the SS Commanding General Wolff, that he was taking personal charge of all deposits and directing evacuation measures by German troops!
Montagnana was, at the moment of my first visit, under enemy shellfire, so we proceeded from Montegufoni to Poppiano in the intense noon heat.
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Here the Villa Guicciardini had received a direct shell hit on one corner, reducing to shambles one of the principal rooms. There- after they tramped over die altarpiece with their hobnailed boots, grinding the plaster and brick dust into the surface of the picture. It is a tribute to the durability of Cinquecento panel painting that there was anything left. The day before my arrival Vaughan Thomas had labored with Fasola to clear off the rubble and lift the damaged masterpiece to comparative safety.
The pic- ture seemed in frightful condition. Parts of it were unrecognizable.
Appar- ently the plaster had been ground into the color, and in other places the color removed to lay bare the underlying gesso. But later the delicate cleaning in the Gabinetto dei Restawl showed that only a few portions of the surface, mostly in the drapery, had been really badly damaged. I now made the acquaintance of a man who was to be of help throughout my stay in Tuscany, a member of the British Military Police, Captain Roberson.
He had appeared with Italian civilian police guards, already requested by Vaughan Thomas, and together we all began the long job of moving the pic- tures out of the damaged room and into a place of greater safety. Leaving Captain Roberson and Professor Fasola at the villa, 1 later went down the hill to the Castello Guidi, where as yet no disasters had occurred, save for two small and unimportant sixteenth century canvases which had been slashed by a New Zealand soldier.
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It was a relief to walk through undamaged rooms, but the appearance of security soon proved to be illusory. The main tower of the castle was being used as the observation post for an artillery battalion attached to the New Zealand division, directing all fire in the area. I immediately conferred with the battalion commander, who advised me to try to evacuate the pictures at once. As soon as the Germans discovered the OP, he stated, the village would be plastered. In the early evening Vaughan Thomas and I visited the neighboring Indian Brigade headquarters, where the operations officer at first promised us trucks and m.
So the pictures had to be left where they were. As luck would have it, however, the New Zealanders left the following day, and no shell ever hit Castello Guidi. We were all deeply concerned with the problem of guarding these deposits to prevent any repetition of the thoughtless damage caused bv the New Zea- landers. Captain Roberson's Italian police would prevent anv harm from civilian marauders, but a military guard was essential. This had to come from a head- quarters higher than the continually shifting divisions.
In this rather un- conventional letter, entirely out of military channels, I requested guards not only for the liberated deposits but for those which might be found later, and supplied a list of all those we knew anything about, with approximate map references. The urgency of the prob- lem of the deposits was far beyond anything we had yet encountered in Tus- cany, even the disaster at San Gimignano.
I wanted to be detached from the Florence team, which could perfectly well be handled by two oflEcers, be assigned the job of the deposits, and be the first to reach each one before there was time for much damage by troops. I could then make the reports, set the guards, and take any measures possible for safeguarding the Florentine treas- ures. After a late supper at the press camp the driver and I, tired to the bone, set out on the ninety-mile trip.
The evening was wonderfully cool and clear, and a high moon, almost at the full, compensated for the fact that we could use no lights in this combat zone. The events of the past two days, combined with apprehension over the fate of the deposits, filled my tired brain with a fantastic confusion of images as the Via Cassia swept us over the Florentine hills, past the silent, deserted ruins of Poggibonsi, around the walls and towers of Staggia, through the mediaeval streets of Siena, and off into the desolate world of barren hills and wide, dry valleys opening out toward the familiar cone of Mount Amiata.
The curves of the Arbia were marked only by their misty poplars and wil- lows. At Buonconvento the Bailey bridge substitute for the destroyed mediaeval bridge was for northbound trafBc only, so we took the detour which had been bulldozed through the fields. The jeep churned up enormous clouds of dry dust which boiled around and above us, choking white and luminous in the moon- light.
Blinded by dust we missed the turning beyond Buonconvento, and lost our way on country roads. Only after half an hour did we come to a straight- away which gave promise of leading to a bridge across the Arbia. Too tired to think clearly, the driver again took a wrong turn and we charged up an embankment leading to a blown bridge. The brakes were defective, but miracu- lously we stopped on the jagged edge of the smashed abutment.
We proceeded without further mishap as far as Montepulciano, our last ob- stacle before emerging into the plain of Lake Trasimeno. But at the top of Montepulciano hill, at two-thirty in the morning, our defective brakes gave out entirely and we had to spend the rest of the chilly night curled up in the jeep until I could hitch-hike to Castiglione for help. I had small difficulty in persuading the Group Captain and Major Newton to agree to my plan, and thus temporarily exchanged my job as regional mfaa officer for a post far in advance of army amg.
Howard, was a stocky taciturn ex-infantryman from the West Virginia hills, excellent both as driver and mechanic. As soon as I had cleaned off the grime of forty-eight hours of mined and shell-torn roads we started out again, arriving at San Donato in Poggio in the early evening. As a matter of fact, this policy was continued later when the area came under Fifth Army, and not until November were the last guards removed from the deposits in the area around Montegufoni.
That same afternoon Howard and I moved into the castle of Montegufoni. The picmresque Mahratta battalion had already left for the assault on Flor- ence, to be replaced by a small guard unit under the command of a young British lieutenant. I chose a large room with a gigantic four-poster Seicento bed and a view out over the valley to the towers and cypresses of Poppiano.
Directly below this room was the salone containing the largest of the pictures. Water had ceased to flow in the absence of electricity to work the pump. Light was furnished by whatever candles we could steal. Meals were sketchy at first, until through the good offices of the custodian we discovered an old peasant woman to cook for us. It was more than a month before I was to move my belongings from this room again — a month of wild trips on dusty, traffic- packed roads, a month of shellfire and ruin, a month of work and worry and grief as one shattered monument after another, one rifled deposit after another, demanded help that was almost impossible to give; a month of un- speakable fatigue and sleepless nights, looking from my window down the hill into the crowding cypresses of the Baroque gardens, while the countryside trembled from the guns all night long.
No exact reports were forthcoming in the morning at the press camp, but it was known that New Zealand units had already entered the portion of the city lying on the south bank of the Arno, that the city was divided between the opposing armies by the destruction of the bridges, and that there was fierce machine-gun fire from bank to bank.
So ended our hopes that Florence would be spared! The wonderful city, the birthplace and nucleus of the Renaissance, lay a victim of the conflict we had felt sure would pass it by. Yet not until my own entrance into Florence on August 13 did I begin to realize the full extent of the tragedy.
After lunch the next day. General Alexander, his chief-of -staff. Lieutenant General Harding, and several of his aides, started off with Vaughan Thomas and me to Montegufoni, in spite of warnings against the dangers of the area. Three open jeeps had been prepared for the party, undecorated save for a tiny Union Jack on the nose of the lead vehicle, driven by Alexander himself, four rows of ribbons glittering on his grey bush jacket. We arrived covered with dust and Professor Fasola was there to receive us.
The General greeted the refugees and peasants who had gathered about the castle and shook hands warmly with Fasola, congratulating him on his devotion to duty. Then for two hours we walked about the collection.
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The General wanted to see each room and wished an explanation of every picture. He had a considerable knowl- edge of art, and although his favorite period was French Impressionism he was much interested in the Renaissance and enjoyed particularly the Primavera. Before leaving, he expressed his willingness to do everything possible to aid our work. I never had the honor of seeing General Alexander again, but I more than once had cause to thank him for his interest in the mfaa officers and their work. The following day Howard and I went on one of our most harrowing trips, to the deposit of pieces of sculpture from the Uffizi Gallery, housed in an eleventh century castle, called Torre del Castellano, opposite Incisa in a curve of the Arno above Figline, which by this time the Eighth Army advance had left in the rear.
Torre del Castellano contained much of the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman sculpture from the Medici collections, as well as numerous portrait busts of the Medici family.
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Perhaps the most important objects there were the series of the Children of Niobe. We arrived at Figline across the same hill road that had not yet been taken when I first came up to Montegufoni, and found that the bridge across the Arno at Incisa, destroyed by the Germans, had not yet been replaced.