Volunteers at work on flood-damaged books, February 1967. Photo: Mary, a mud angel

Within days of the flood of November 4, 1966, Florence began to fill with young people. They came by train and car and hitchhiking, from the rest of Italy and from abroad - according to the Comune di Firenze, from some seventy countries. Most had no training and no plan. They were students, art lovers, foreign residents, soldiers on leave, people who had seen the pictures and gone. They worked for nothing, in cold, oily mud, pulling books, paintings, archives and objects out of flooded basements before the damage became permanent. The Florentines called them gli angeli del fango - the mud angels.

What they did

The work was mostly unglamorous and exhausting. At the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the National Central Library, much of the collection had been moved into the basement in 1944, during the war, and never moved back. Close to a million volumes were under water, along with millions of catalogue cards. Volunteers formed human chains up the stairs from the flooded stacks and passed the waterlogged books hand to hand, then spread them out to dry anywhere there was space - on floors, on racks, in the reading rooms, and later in tobacco-drying kilns and granaries outside the city, and at the Forte di Belvedere.

Others scraped mud from paintings and sculpture, carried panel paintings to the Limonaia of the Boboli Gardens (turned into an emergency drying room), shoveled out shops and homes, and handed out food and water. The fuel oil that coated everything made the work dirtier and more dangerous than plain floodwater. Many volunteers stayed for weeks; some stayed for months.

Who they were

Italians made up most of the volunteers, but the foreigners were the ones the world's newspapers noticed. American students already in Florence for a semester abroad found themselves doing recovery work instead of attending classes. The inaugural class of the California State University program in Florence was one such group; more than fifty years later, they remain close friends, bound by that autumn (see Films for the documentary about them). Florida State University's first-year students in Florence were another; a new documentary about them, Mud Angels Recovered, appeared for the 60th anniversary in 2026.

Over the years, this site has received photographs and memories from people who were there. A volunteer named Mary sent us her photographs of book recovery work from February 1967, months after the flood, when the effort was still in full swing. A U.S. Army soldier stationed at Camp Darby, near Pisa, sent pictures and recollections of the troops sent into Florence. Those collections remain on this site:

• Photos from a Mud Angel and More Mud Angel Photos
• A soldier's photographs and memories from Camp Darby

Photographs by Mary, a volunteer, February 1967. More in Photos from a Mud Angel and More Mud Angel Photos.

Photographs by a U.S. Army soldier stationed at Camp Darby. More in his post.

Some volunteers were famous. Senator Edward Kennedy was in Geneva when the flood struck; urged by his sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy, he went to Florence and worked as one of the mud angels.

The professionals: Peter Waters and the books

Goodwill alone could not save the books. The recovery at the National Library needed technical direction, and much of it came from England. Peter Waters, an English bookbinder and conservator, came to Florence in the weeks after the flood and took charge of the technical side of the book rescue, working with the library's director Emanuele Casamassima and a team of British and American bookbinders and conservators, among them Anthony Cains and Christopher Clarkson.

The problem was one of scale. No library had ever had to treat hundreds of thousands of water- and oil-soaked books at once. Waters and his colleagues developed methods for sorting, washing, drying and rebinding on an industrial scale - what later became known as mass treatment - and for deciding which damage to treat first. The approach they worked out in Florence became a foundation of modern library conservation and of how libraries plan for disasters today. Waters went on to lead conservation at the Library of Congress in Washington from 1971 to 1995. His letters home from Florence were published by his widow, the calligrapher Sheila Waters, in 2016 as Waters Rising: Letters from Florence (see Books).

What they left behind

The mud angels are remembered for what they saved, but their legacy is wider. The experience helped turn conservation into an international profession with shared methods, and it shaped the training of a generation of conservators. In Italy it also changed how the state thought about volunteers: the 1970 law that laid the foundations of the national civil protection system was the first to formally recognize volunteer work in disasters.

And the work is still not finished. Sixty years on, the National Library is still restoring flood-damaged volumes; in the run-up to the 2026 anniversary it brought students and citizens together to help with some 30,000 books that have never returned to use.

If you were a mud angel, we would like to hear from you - see About.