Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (21 page)

Wolff knew that Hofer was the “uncrowned king in his own Gau.” Carlo Anti, General Director of Fine Arts under Mussolini’s reconstituted government, observed, “In Alto Adige one has the impression to be in an autonomous territory, that is neither Italy nor Germany. In addition, Hofer is of absolutist temperament, fanatic Tyrolese and expressly anti-Italian, who decides exclusively according to what he wants and on everything, be it on small or on big problems, without listening to opinions or explanations. . . .” Wolff believed he could work with Hofer, but the Gauleiter’s alignment with other hard-core Austrian Nazis, including Gauleiter August Eigruber and General of the Police and Waffen-SS Ernst Kaltenbrunner—Wolff’s “deadly enemy”—meant he had to be watched.

LINKLATER AND VAUGHAN THOMAS
entered Florence on the morning of August 4, alongside the South African Armoured Division, the New Zealanders, the 24th Guards Brigade, and the 4th Infantry Division. Linklater observed:

The Florentines of the South Bank, poor people for the most part, gave us a warmer welcome than the Romans. Tears streaked their faces while they cheered. . . . Vaughan Thomas . . . was mercilessly embraced by a bristle-bearded labourer while I, with my left arm clutched to an unseen but young and palpitating bosom, was being heartily kissed by a pair of the plainest old trots in Tuscany; but then the crowd broke and scattered as snipers opened fire from a window or a roof. . . . the smoke of ruined buildings was still rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio, and bursts of machine-gun fire echoed along the river bank. . . . In the late afternoon rain drove the people indoors, and all the flowers they had thrown lay wetly trampled on empty streets.

Captain Roger Ellis, the first Monuments officer to enter Florence, arrived one full week after Linklater and Vaughan Thomas had entered the city. Ellis immediately began inspecting monuments and churches on the south side of the Arno, but he determined that “the tactical situation prevented any inspection north of the river.” Hartt, who had spent the previous eleven days bringing order and security to the repositories, was filled with anxiety over his inability to get into Florence and be the first to make contact with the city’s art officials. He later noted: “By August 12 the suspense of waiting for an order to go to Florence had become unbearable, and I drove down to Eighth Army headquarters to try to cut the waiting short.”

Hartt entered the southern portion of Florence the following morning, “in a state of feverish excitement. . . . The destruction of Florence seemed the end of all civilization. . . . We passed below the Certosa di Galuzzo, still undamaged on its hilltop, which I had last seen as a young student years before. At the road fork below Poggio Imperiale the direct road into Porta Romana, the great southern gate of the city, was closed by a simple sign with the words ‘Under Enemy Observation.’ . . . The valley around reverberated with shellfire.”

At Villa Torrigiani, temporary headquarters of the Allied Military government, Hartt found Professor Filippo Rossi, Director of the Galleries of Florence, and Dr. Ugo Procacci. An impromptu meeting followed, during which Hartt explained the purpose of the MFAA and described the expertise of his fellow Monuments officers. When the meeting ended, Hartt had a complete list of the locations of the Florentine repositories and their contents.

Hartt had to see the damage to the medieval part of the city for himself. He and Procacci attempted to reach the Ponte Vecchio, but “a mass of rubble thirty feet high” prevented access, so they had to climb a makeshift ladder from one side of the Boboli Gardens to reach the portion of the Vasari Corridor that hadn’t been damaged. In an instant, centuries of beauty and history had disintegrated.

On the south bank the wonderful old buildings that overhung the river, those anonymous accretions of ages, floor on floor, balconies, arches, crowding roof tops all supported on consoles over the water—how often had we seen them, how often walked them at night to gaze through Vasari’s arches at the picturesque wall of houses reflected in the quiet stream. It was these houses that had given the Ponte Vecchio its beauty, a city vaulting the river. Now it stood stripped, the houses all one gigantic trash pile together, spilling into the Arno. . . . Form to formlessness, beauty to horror, history to mindlessness, all in one blinding crash.

A week passed before Hartt had time to compose his first official report. Hardly a notable structure escaped mention, including the churches of Santa Croce, Santo Spirito, and San Lorenzo, as well as the Uffizi, the Duomo, and the Baptistery. But one part of his report focused on something besides buildings and monuments: “Santo Stefano, in Por Santa Maria is gravely damaged. The 13th-century façade is split from top to portal, the roof tiles are gone, and the interior full of rubble. The 93-year-old
parroco
, Padre Veneziani, refused to leave his church, and died from the concussion of the mines. His body was removed only 18 August, from the sacristy where it had lain since 3 August.” The death of this parish priest attached a face to the mission for Fred Hartt, something Deane Keller had understood from the beginning.

On August 31, AMG headquarters received a telegram sent by the Swiss Government. They had transmitted it four days earlier, but circumstances prevented its receipt. The telegram contained a strange message:

German authorities have stored in Villa Reale Poggio a Caiano . . . valuable artistic collections and archives concerning Tuscan Renaissance works. Stated by German Government that there are in neighborhood Villa Reale no repeat no German troops and Villa Reale itself not used for military purposes. German Government desires to inform British and American Governments of its desire to avoid bombardment or destruction Villa Reale. Grateful you inform Army AMG of contents of this message.

Hartt viewed this message with great skepticism, especially after having heard about Poggi’s unsavory experiences with Langsdorff and other German officers during the last days of occupation. While the message might have been a sincere effort by German Kunstschutz officials to protect the Tuscan monuments, Hartt worried about what he would find once he reached the villa at Poggio a Caiano. For now, he could only wait.

*
Wolff requested this designation, which took effect on July 26, 1944.

17

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CEMETERY IN THE WORLD”

SEPTEMBER 1944

W
hile Fred Hartt and the British Eighth Army were in liberated Florence battling the consequences of German occupation, Deane Keller and the U.S. Fifth Army were fifty miles to the west, about to enter Pisa after a brutal struggle to dislodge German forces.

Following the liberation of Rome, Allied forces had attempted to sprint north, hoping to split and destroy the two main German fighting units before they could cross the Arno and reestablish superior defensive positions. By late summer, however, Allied generals made the decision to halt offensive operations and allow weary troops to rest after their furious push up the peninsula from Cassino. They also needed to regroup, now that seven divisions of troops had been withdrawn from Italy to aid in Operation Dragoon, the Allied landings in southern France on August 15.

Kesselring’s troops made excellent use of this delay by accelerating completion of the Gothic Line, the Nazis’ last major fixed defensive position in Italy. The Gothic Line ran the width of Italy—from the west coast about twenty miles north of Pisa, across the ridges of the Apennine Mountains, and down to the east-coast city of Pesaro, just north of Ancona. This ten-mile-deep perimeter had been fortified with 2,376 machine-gun posts; 479 mortar, antitank, and assault guns; and seventy-five miles of barbed wire—all taking advantage of the mountainous terrain. Allied penetration of the Gothic Line would facilitate passage over the Apennines and provide a clear shot to Germany’s southern door. The longer the Germans could delay the Allies in Pisa, the more time they had to complete the Gothic Line defenses. The city paid dearly.

Pisa, a city with ancient, yet still debated, origins, sits astride the Arno River some eight miles inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city owes its early development to the Romans, who understood the strategic position of its ports. Pisa reached the height of its political power as a Maritime Republic by the second half of the twelfth century. That growth and consequent prosperity funded construction of its
Duomo
(cathedral) in 1063,
Battistero
(Baptistery) in 1152,
Campanile di Santa Maria
(bell tower, better known as the Leaning Tower) in 1174, and
Camposanto
(cemetery) in 1278.

The city’s political and economic decline began in 1284 with a naval defeat at the hands of the Genoese and culminated in 1406 when a cruel siege by their fierce rivals, the Florentines, ended the autonomy of the city and significantly reduced the population. The matter was settled in a rather expensive way: the Florentines accepted the secret offer of Giovanni Gambacorta,
signore
[leader] of Pisa and now betrayer of the citizens’ trust, and bought the city of Pisa for 50,000 gold florins and the trade of a few castles and fortresses. Over the next hundred years, momentary glimpses of its heyday appeared, such as the creation of a botanical garden—Europe’s oldest—in 1544. But the once-dominant Maritime Republic of Pisa no longer held sway on the Mediterranean. Such defenseless beauty made the cruelties of August 1944 all the more tragic.

As late as July 28, Vatican Deputy Secretary of State Monsignor Giovanni Montini had appealed for the city to be spared. In a letter to Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s personal representative to the pope, Montini stated: “The Holy See . . . cannot do other than entertain the liveliest fears for the fate of such a city as Pisa, where generations of believers and artists have erected irreplaceable religious, historical and artistic monuments, whose destruction would constitute an irreparable loss not only for Catholics but for the whole civilized world.”

But despite its world-famous monuments, and numerous appeals by the Holy Father, Pisa had—inexplicably—only received a Group C status from Allied Military leaders. Thus, while Allied pilots received instructions to avoid hitting monuments, they were also told in advance that any consequent damage was accepted. The contrast in the treatment of Florence, a Group A city, and that of Pisa, a Group C city, was stark. In both cities, Allied forces succeeded in driving German troops north of the Arno River. But whereas Florence suffered minor damage at the hands of the Allies, repeated bombing runs flattened its once-more-powerful rival. Fifth Army artillery further devastated the buildings the bombers had missed during the six-week battle.

In four months, Keller had already driven more than eight thousand miles, over dusty, potholed, bomb-scarred roads, inspecting hundreds of damaged towns. Although he had seen plenty of misery and hardship, the situation in Pisa exceeded anything he could have imagined. Upon entering the city on September 2, Keller noted, “The south side was so badly destroyed in part that a new City Plan has been worked out.” The city was a skeleton of its former self. “The south side of the city was booby trapped and the whole area was thickly sewn with mines.” The danger drove away the citizens; Keller saw but two civilians in a city with a prewar population of seventy-two thousand.

Keller’s AMG advance team, seven officers with different specialties, carefully maneuvered their jeeps around the mounds of debris. They climbed over ruins, jumping at the occasional rat in the rubble, all the while looking for mines. Because of the number of booby-trapped buildings, it took most of the first day just to reach the old city hall near the banks of the Arno. There, as the sky burned orange and the sun dipped to the horizon, Keller and Captain McCallum, the engineer on Keller’s reconnaissance team, hung the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack from the building’s balcony so that they faced the river. Their sense of pride was short-lived. “There was little sleep that night, for the American Batteries within a block of the billets fired every few minutes and the Germans flew over and dropped bombs and their shells continued to fall.”

Early the next morning, Keller crossed the Arno over the remains of a narrow streetcar track that was once attached to the Ponte Solferino near the city center. Just as they had in Florence, German forces had detonated demolition charges as they moved northward out of the city, destroying the Ponte Solferino and the city’s other three bridges. The historical importance of the bridges was of secondary concern to Keller. He wanted to reach his primary objective, the Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles), where the Duomo
,
Baptistery, Leaning Tower, and Camposanto were located.

Keller was initially encouraged when he entered the piazza. The Baptistery had sustained hits; he observed several holes in the roof of the Duomo and one on a façade column, but none looked serious. A glance to his right confirmed that the Leaning Tower had maintained its flawed verticality. However, after walking farther north and emerging from between the Baptistery and the Duomo, he stopped in his tracks: the roof of the Camposanto was gone. Only a few stubs of charred timber were visible. In this war, even the cemeteries were dying.

The architectural curiosity of the Leaning Tower, and the adjacent Baptistery, with an intricately carved thirteenth-century marble pulpit by Nicola Pisano, had always drawn steady crowds. But the jewel of the Piazza dei Miracoli was the Camposanto
,
a building constructed atop the site of the ancient cemetery on the north side of the piazza. Its exterior walls measured 40 feet high by 415 feet long by 171 feet wide (slightly larger than an American football field). A rectangular grass courtyard in the center opened to the sky, much in the style of a cloister. It was said that soil had been brought from Golgotha, the hill on which Jesus was crucified. Opposite the exterior walls were Gothic marble arcades open to the grass courtyard from each side and crowned by enormous wooden A-frame beams that supported a roof made of lead.

For almost seven centuries, the Camposanto, not the Leaning Tower, had been the “must-see” destination for visitors to Pisa. Hordes had come to gaze upon its extensive frescoes. A much younger Deane Keller had made the pilgrimage during his student days at the American Academy. Paintings and frescoes are usually measured in inches or centimeters, occasionally in feet or meters. But the inner walls of the Camposanto displayed some twenty thousand square feet of vibrantly colored frescoes painted by some of the most talented artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The frescoed walls extended horizontally for more than a fifth of a mile. The volume of painted space boggles the mind. (For comparison, the area of frescoes in the Camposanto was about three thousand square feet larger than the area of frescoes in the entire Sistine Chapel.)

Keller knew that the Camposanto glorified local memory stretching back to the medieval era. Richly colored Early Renaissance frescoes depicting
The Last Judgment
,
Hell
, and
The Triumph of Death
surrounded the cemetery’s “permanent residents” and filled the walls along the corridors, floor to ceiling. The marble pavement was interspersed with sepulchres, each marking the burial spot of a luminary of the city or a member of the Medici family.
*
Throughout the building, statuary sat atop stone pedestals in front of the frescoed walls. The Gothic marble arcades providing the building’s interior structural support diffused the sunlight that emerged from the grass courtyard, creating beautiful shadows. The famous golden light filtered through this kaleidoscope, changing throughout the day and the seasons. Facing the frescoed walls, at the base of the arcades, were 125 Roman sarcophagi, some distinctly and elaborately carved, which had been opened and reused in the Middle Ages.

But Keller’s overriding memory wasn’t of the building’s beauty—its frescoes, tombs, or history. It was of the serenity of the space, a welcoming respite for the living, a solemn resting place for the dead. The bombs had destroyed that peace as much as the fire had mangled its contents.

Keller’s report of the destruction read like an autopsy:

On the floor next to the walls were thousands of pieces of fresco which had fallen to the ground either from the heat [or] the concussion from the jarring of the great beams as they fell to the floor. These were mingled with myriads of pieces of broken roof tiles, carved chunks of all sizes from the tombs, blackened embers and nails. All the sculptures were covered on the upper sides thoroughly with the molten lead and the perpendicular surfaces were streaked with it. Stains from heat and the running lead were to be found on tombs and paintings alike.

Extreme temperatures cause expansion or contraction of moisture within the frescoed plaster, which then leads to disintegration. For this reason, frescoed surfaces are mostly found inside covered dry spaces. While the Camposanto frescoes were susceptible to general humidity, the roof precluded exposure to sun or rain. With the roof gone, what frescoes remained affixed to the wall had been baked for thirty-eight days by the intense Tuscan sun, reducing many of them to a chalky dust. “Thousands of pieces” wildly understated the volume of fragments; it had to be into the millions. The floor of the Camposanto contained an immense jigsaw puzzle.

Keller suspended his inspection to speak with Bruno Farnesi, the
capo tecnico
of the piazza complex, who had witnessed the fire. Farnesi approached Keller, speaking Italian so hurriedly that Keller had to calm him down and ask him to begin again. After catching his breath, Farnesi told Keller that on July 27, five weeks earlier, a violent artillery barrage had shaken the Piazza dei Miracoli. The Americans seemed to be aiming at a German observation post in the Leaning Tower. Although the use of church steeples and the heights of historic buildings as observation posts violated the rules of war, it had happened often in Italy and quickly became a common occurrence in the battles of northern Europe.

Farnesi watched as a few shells hit the massive structure, but he doubted the Allies were trying to destroy the Leaning Tower. German soldiers had established a position there to call in target coordinates to artillery batteries located far away from the Square of Miracles. Several other rounds struck the Duomo where the archbishop said Mass. Farnesi knew the cathedral was strong. It could take a dozen blows. But when the shelling stopped and the sky cleared, he saw a thin column of smoke rising from the Camposanto.

Even from the ground, flames were clearly visible on the northern side of the roof. Farnesi said he would have doused the flames, but the city had been without water for days. The only “weapon” to fight the fire was a tall ladder, which Farnesi had placed inside the Camposanto two months earlier.

Farnesi and a small group of volunteers, armed with nothing more than shovels, clubs, and poles, climbed the ladder, but the wind off the Tyrrhenian Sea was pushing the fire across the roof faster than the men could fight it. The day was dying, but the fire was gathering strength. Farnesi watched as it ran along the great wooden support beams and wrapped its fingers around the lead roof. The beams snapped and crashed to the ground, causing the lead to run in rivulets down the walls. Farnesi urged the men forward, despite the blistering heat.

A shell whistled in, hitting the Duomo. But the great building held. Soon a volley of shells was raining down on the complex. The crowd scattered. The men struggled down the ladder and huddled behind the walls of the Camposanto. The shellfire seemed to be coming from the south, where the Americans were encamped. While the wall offered no protection from artillery, it was the only spot sheltered from the heat of the flames. Another explosion less than a hundred feet away knocked one of the men off his feet. This time, the small group ran for the safety of the cathedral.

Some time later, maybe ten minutes or an hour—it was impossible for Farnesi to determine—the artillery fire stopped. When he stepped outside, night had fallen.

Farnesi continued the sorry tale, his hands trembling:

I went back to the monument, and it was even clearer to me now how we were absolutely powerless to prevent its complete destruction. I had to witness the tragic sight, impotent, with a lump in my throat and an oppressed and bleeding heart. We stared at the destroying flames, and I had a fleeting, yet clear vision of the long time I had spent there; and my thoughts went to the works carried out with care and love, to the complete restoration of the roof and to the entire rearrangement of the Sarcophagi and of all other monuments, to the Commission, to the Polemics on the conservation of the famous frescoes and on their restoration, to the concerns for even one drop of water on the walls, to the care of the roses and the lawn; in short, to everything that happened every day, for twenty years.