The flood has a small but strong shelf of books in English: one fine narrative history, a remarkable set of letters from the man who led the book rescue, a technical record of what conservators learned, and one novel that gets the mud angels right. These are the ones worth reading.

History

Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces - Robert Clark (Doubleday, 2008)

The best single book in English on the flood, and the place to start. Clark lived in Florence, on Piazza del Carmine, for most of two years while researching it. It tells the story of the night and the recovery, of the mud angels and the restorers, but it is also a book about Florence itself - about the two cities, the one Florentines live in and the one the world comes to see, and why the world rushed to save it. When the book came out, Random House put us in touch with Clark, and he answered our questions about the research by email: read the interview.

Waters Rising: Letters from Florence - Sheila Waters (The Legacy Press, 2016)

The calligrapher Sheila Waters tells the story of her husband Peter Waters (1930-2003), the English bookbinder who directed the technical side of the rescue of the National Central Library's books, largely through the letters he wrote home from Florence between November 1966 and the spring of 1967, together with her own diary. It is the recovery effort seen from the inside, day by day. The book comes with a DVD of the Royal College of Art's 1968 film of the restoration work (see Films).

Conservation Legacies of the Florence Flood of 1966 (Archetype Publications)

The proceedings of the symposium New York University held in Florence for the 40th anniversary in 2006, with contributions from many of the conservators who worked on the recovery. More technical than the books above, and the best source on how the flood changed conservation practice.

Dear Eddie and Popp: Letters from the Florence Flood of '66 (SACI)

Published by SACI, the Studio Arts College International in Florence: the typed letters the American artist and designer James Hogg wrote to his father-in-law about the flood as he witnessed it, paired with photographs.

"Florence Rises from the Flood" - Joseph Judge, National Geographic, July 1967

Not a book, but one of the most widely read contemporary accounts in English, published eight months after the flood and illustrated with color photographs.

Fiction

The Sixteen Pleasures - Robert Hellenga (Soho Press, 1994)

A novel narrated by Margot Harrington, a young American who comes to Florence after the flood as a mud angel and is drawn into the work of restoring damaged books - and into a mystery, and a love story, built around a forbidden book hidden in a convent library. It is fiction, but the details of the flood and of book restoration are carefully done.

New for the 60th anniversary

• Libri e frammenti dall'alluvione (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, 2026) - on the flood-damaged books and the manuscript fragments found in their bindings (in Italian).
• La fiuma - Dario Franceschini, presented in Florence on November 2, 2026 as part of the anniversary program (in Italian).

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