Almost everyone's mental image of the 1966 flood is in black and white: the press photographs and newsreels that went around the world in the days afterward. Color film in 1966 was expensive and comparatively rare, and few people who happened to have it loaded were in a position to use it while the water was still in the streets. Color pictures of the aftermath do exist - National Geographic illustrated its July 1967 report, "Florence Rises from the Flood," with them, and there is amateur color film by Francesco Corsi (see Films). But color photographs taken during the flood itself, through the night and the first morning, are very scarce. This page is about two sets of them, and about how this website came to be involved in bringing one of them home to Florence.

Joe Blaustein

In November 1966 Joseph Blaustein, an American advertising executive, was traveling in Italy with his wife, who was pregnant at the time. They were staying in a pensione close to the Arno when the river came over its banks. Like nearly everyone in the city that night, they were trapped where they were. Blaustein happened to have a couple of rolls of color slide film with him.

He photographed the flood from the windows of the pensione during the night. The next morning and the following day, as soon as it was possible to move around at all, he made his way through the city on both sides of the river, photographing what he found. The result is a set of color images of Florence in the first hours after the flood that, as far as anyone has been able to establish, has no real equivalent.

Over the following decades Blaustein tried more than once to offer his slides to the city of Florence. Each time, the offer went nowhere.

Joseph Blaustein's photographs, November 1966. © Archivio della città di Firenze.

How the photographs came back to Florence

This website was started in Florence in 2006, the year of the flood's 40th anniversary. Because it was one of the few English-language sites devoted to the flood, it began to receive letters from people who had been there - residents, students, soldiers and volunteers. Joe Blaustein was one of them. He got in touch through the site, told his story by email and eventually sent scans of some of his slides.

Getting those images to the right people took more than three and a half years. Through friends and contacts in Florence - above all Paolo De Rocco of Centrica - we arranged a first meeting and showed scans of the slides, on a laptop, to Carlo Francini, who heads the UNESCO office of the Comune di Firenze. Francini brought them to the attention of the Archivio della città, the city archive. In early 2013 Blaustein, who was in Tuscany at the time on a teaching trip, met Luca Brogioni and his colleagues at the archive, together with Paolo De Rocco and Silvia Gallini - the artist and filmmaker who worked with Blaustein and whose help, especially with the endless back-and-forth in Italian, was vital. At that meeting the archive accepted Blaustein's offer to donate his original slides to the city.

On Thursday, November 28, 2013, the Archivio della città presented the photographs to the public for the first time in the exhibition Tutti i colori dell'alluvione ("All the Colors of the Flood"), held in the Biblioteca delle Oblate, across the street from the archive. After nearly fifty years, Blaustein's photographs were finally in Florence's own collections. Silvia Gallini's film about Blaustein, The Dog and the Duck, tells more of his story.

The original posts from that time are still on this site:

• Color photos of the flood of 1966 - the first post about Blaustein's photographs
• Exhibit of Color Photographs of the 1966 Florence Flood - the full account of how the donation came about
• Joe Blaustein's Color Photos - the images released to the press
• Pictures from the exhibition opening

The Blaustein photographs are held by the Archivio della città di Firenze. Please contact the archive about reproduction.

Balthazar Korab

The second set began with a single color image of the flood that kept turning up credited to a "B. Kolrab." No photographer of that name existed. After some digging, the picture turned out to be the work of Balthazar Korab, the Hungarian-born American architectural photographer, based in Michigan and best known for his photographs of modernist buildings. Korab had been in Florence in November 1966, and he too had color film.

Korab's archive is now in the Library of Congress in Washington. It contains hundreds of slides and photographs, many of which have probably never been seen by the public - among them a view toward Piazza Santa Trinita from the Arno on November 4, 1966, with two figures wading through water up to their chests (see the photograph). The story of tracking down the "Kolrab" credit is in our original post.

Other photographs on this site

• Photos from a Mud Angel and More Mud Angel Photos - book recovery work in February 1967
• Photographs from a U.S. Army soldier stationed at Camp Darby
• The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz has published an online exhibition of photographs of the flood and of damaged buildings and works of art.

Why color matters

Black and white puts an event at a distance. It files it under history. In color, the flood stops looking like the past: the mud is brown, the river is the dull green-gray of the Arno in flood, the ochre and stone of the city are recognizably the Florence of today. For a city that had grown used to remembering the flood in monochrome, seeing it in color was a shock - and a reminder of how much of the record still sits in private hands, in boxes of slides and family albums.

If you have photographs or film of the flood, we would like to hear from you - see About.