Florence remembers the sixtieth anniversary of the 1966 flood

Sixty years ago, on 4 November 1966, the Arno broke its banks and flooded Florence, submerging streets, shops, libraries and museums under metres of water, mud and fuel oil. ANSA reconstructs the events, reporting that the river’s water reached up to 5 metres in height in some of the city’s streets, causing 36 deaths.

Today, on the sixtieth anniversary, Florence remembers that day with an official ceremony at Palazzo Vecchio, as reported by ViVi Green, which places the initiative within a programme of events promoted by the Municipality of Florence and the Tuscany Region dedicated to the memory of the flood and to hydrogeological risk prevention.

Among the details that bring back the chronicle of those hours is the testimony about one of the first warning signals broadcast at national level: at dawn on 4 November 1966, journalist Dante Nocentini was among the first to report, via teleprinter, that the Arno had overflowed in the Valdarno and that the flood was advancing towards Florence, where the river had begun to overflow shortly before five in the morning.

The combination of the two sources consulted — ANSA’s historical reconstruction and ViVi Green’s report on today’s initiative — presents a picture in which the memory of the 1966 event is today joined to a stated commitment to prevention: the day’s programme, promoted by Tuscan institutions, is explicitly linked to the theme of hydrogeological risk, not only to the commemoration of the memory.

The ceremony at Palazzo Vecchio falls exactly sixty years after that 4 November, on the same day of the week on which the Arno broke its banks in 1966.