On the night of November 3-4, 1966, after days of relentless rain, the Arno broke its banks and poured into Florence. By morning the historic center was under water, mud and heating oil - up to roughly 6.7 meters (22 feet) deep in the Santa Croce district. Thirty-five people died: 17 in the city and 18 elsewhere in the province. About a million volumes at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale were submerged, and some of the most important works of art in the Western world were damaged in a matter of hours.

Wednesday, November 4, 2026 marks sixty years. It is also, as it happens, twenty years since this website was started, during the 40th anniversary in 2006. With each anniversary fewer of those who lived through the flood - Florentines and the volunteers who came to be called the angeli del fango, the mud angels - remain to tell their stories in person.

The program was drawn up jointly by the Comune di Firenze, the Regione Toscana, the University of Florence and the Metropolitan City, under a memorandum of understanding signed in July 2026. Its theme is as much about prevention as memory: how a city that was caught with no warning in 1966 protects itself from the Arno now. The full, continually updated calendar is at firenze2026.it.

November 4: the day itself

• 9 a.m. - Basilica di Santa Croce. Mass celebrated by Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, in the church and neighborhood that took the worst of the water.
• 10:15 a.m. - Procession to the Ponte alle Grazie, followed at about 10:30 a.m. by the laying of a wreath in the Arno in memory of the victims.
• 12 p.m. - Accademia di Belle Arti. Opening of the exhibition Le forme del fango ("The Shapes of the Mud").
• 4:30 p.m. - Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio. The official ceremony, attended by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella.
• Palazzo Vecchio, Sala d'Arme. Opening of the main anniversary exhibition, Firenze per il mondo, il mondo per Firenze ("Florence for the World, the World for Florence"), on the international response to the flood. Free; open through November 22.
• 5 p.m. - Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Opening of RI-EMERGERE 1966-2026: L'alluvione di Firenze in Archivio, on the decades-long recovery and restoration of the State Archive's flooded records. Runs into early February 2027.
• Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Piazza dei Cavalleggeri. The National Library - the single institution most associated with the mud angels - opens until 10:30 p.m. with guided visits, music and talks. At 6:30 p.m. it presents the results of a two-year community project in which students and citizens are helping to recover some 30,000 flood-damaged books that have still never been returned to use.
• Fondazione Franco Zeffirelli, Piazza San Firenze 5. Opening of Per Firenze, an exhibition on the fundraising documentary Zeffirelli made in the weeks after the flood, including photographs he took in the first hours. Free; November 4-29, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m..
• Evening. A Marco Masini concert at the Mandela Forum (9 p.m.); a dramatized reading at the Teatro Niccolini (9 p.m.); a Lions Club concert at Santa Maria Novella (8:30 p.m.); and on television, the documentary Bargellini, il sindaco dell'alluvione - on Piero Bargellini, the mayor who led the city through the disaster - on LA7 at 11:30 p.m..

The days around it

• November 2 - A conference in the Salone dei Cinquecento, Arno, a 60 anni dall'alluvione: da minaccia a risorsa, on the river's present and future (9:30 a.m.). The city also unveils plaques to three journalists who got word of the disaster out to Italy and the world: Enrico Mattei, editor of La Nazione, whose newsroom stood under more than four meters of water; Dante Nocentini of ANSA, who sent one of the first alarms over the teletype that night; and Marcello Giannini of RAI. The same day, Palazzo Davanzati hosts a study day on emergency management and the recovery of flooded collections.
• November 3 - A special session of the City Council dedicated to the "generation of the mud angels" (5:30 p.m.), a commemorative postmark at Palazzo Vecchio, and a free concert by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Academy at the Teatro Niccolini (8 p.m.).
• November 3-13 - Angeli del fango, a new Teatro della Toscana production about the volunteers, in the Sotterranei of the Teatro della Pergola, before touring Tuscan towns that were also flooded.
• November 5-17 - Palazzo Medici Riccardi: a photographic exhibition of the streets after the flood, from the photographer Giorgio Lotti and the Italian Army.
• November 5 and 7 - Further Maggio Musicale concerts: a children's choir at Santa Maria Novella (Nov. 5, 7 p.m.) and Mozart's Requiem in the Basilica di Santa Croce (Nov. 7, 9 p.m.).
• November 14 - The Italian Red Cross holds a study day at the Palazzina Reale at Santa Maria Novella station, alongside its historical exhibition in the station's former ticket hall.

For the mud angels - and in the United States

Volunteers came to Florence from some seventy countries in 1966, many of them American students who had arrived for a semester abroad and spent it in the mud. The anniversary program includes a conference titled The Mud Angels Legacy at the University of Florence, and a new documentary, Mud Angels Recovered, revisits Florida State University's first-year students in Florence, who were among them. (This site has long followed the California State University students of the same year; see The Mud Angels.)

For those who can't be in Florence: the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center and Art Conservation Department, with the FAIC Winterthur Oral Histories Program, are holding Dispatches from Florence, a commemorative event on Thursday, November 5, with related events during the week of November 2-7. Details are at drc.udel.edu.

If you lived through it

The State Archive and Fondazione CR Firenze have been collecting first-hand and family memories of the flood for Firenze, 4 novembre 1966: la città racconta l'alluvione, to become part of a collective work presented this November. Over twenty years, many of the most valuable things on this site - including the color photographs of Joe Blaustein, now in the city's archive - arrived the same way: someone who was there got in touch. If you were in Florence in November 1966, as a resident, a student or a volunteer, I would like to hear from you.

Sixty years on: is Florence safe?

The honest answer is: safer, not safe. Since 1966 the river channel under the Ponte Vecchio has been lowered to carry more water, and work has gone into upstream flood-retention basins and into the river-monitoring and warning network whose absence in 1966 meant no one was warned. At its peak the flood carried an estimated 4,100 cubic meters of water per second - roughly twice what the river could pass through the city. Engineers' stated goal is to be able to hold back about 35 million cubic meters upstream of Florence, and that work is not finished. Much of the historic center is still classed as being at medium flood hazard. The anniversary's emphasis on prevention is not a formality.

Read more on this site

• The Flood: November 4, 1966 - what happened, and why
• The Mud Angels - the volunteers and the birth of modern conservation
• Art Restoration - Cimabue's Crucifix, Vasari's Last Supper, the National Library
• Color Photographs - how Joe Blaustein's slides reached the city archive
• Films and Books about the flood

Schedules are taken from the Comune di Firenze's official program of October 28, 2026 and may change; check firenze2026.it before you go.