In July 1967, eight months after the Arno flooded Florence, National Geographic published "Florence Rises from the Flood," a report by Joseph Judge on a city digging itself out of the mud. Illustrated with color photographs from several photographers, it was one of the most widely read accounts of the flood in English.

The article

Joseph Judge (1928-1996) spent 25 years writing and editing for National Geographic, retiring in 1990 as a Senior Associate Editor. His Florence report appeared in the July 1967 issue, when the immediate emergency was over but the recovery - of the city's homes and shops, its churches and museums, and the hundreds of thousands of books at the National Library - was only beginning.

This site came across the article in 2016, in the National Geographic archive at the Library of Congress. Its color photographs are part of the same story told on our Color Photographs page: the flood was recorded in color more often than Florentines long believed.

How to read it

The article is still under copyright, so it isn't reproduced here. You can read the full issue, page by page with its photographs, in two ways:

• Through a library. The National Geographic Virtual Library, published by Gale, contains every page of every issue of the magazine from 1888 to the present. Many public and university libraries subscribe; with a library card you can usually read it from home. Ask your library, or search its online databases, for "National Geographic Virtual Library."
• In print. Copies of the July 1967 issue turn up regularly with secondhand book and magazine dealers.

More on this site

• The Flood - what happened on November 4, 1966, and why
• Color Photographs - Joe Blaustein's slides and Balthazar Korab's photographs
• Books - the best books on the flood