red and white tape, the piles of rubble, metal and plastic that were the bomb’s legacy. Down streets like these Lucy Honeychurch had gotten lost with Miss Lavish; now they were gutted quarries, reminiscent of those through which Michelangelo wandered. The devastation was so intense as to bring to mind photographs of the Lungarno and the Via Por Santa Maria after they were bombed by the Germans in the summer of 1945 – and yet on that occasion, at least, no great art had been destroyed. Starting in 1940, the Fascist government, with alarming foresight, had begun taking protective measures in the event that war should break out, padding some statues and removing others, along with the bronze baptistry doors, to a concrete shelter in the Boboli Gardens. At the Accademia, the Michelangeloswere enclosed within brick silos. Many of the city’s paintings were taken out of Florence altogether, to be housed at some of the grander villas in the countryside, among them Montagnana, Poppiano and the Castello Montegufoni, which was owned by Osbert Sitwell’s father, Sir George Sitwell. In Laughter in the Next Room, the fourth volume of his memoir Left Hand, Right Hand! , Sitwell explains that Montegufoni was chosen
because it is situated in a remote district, but, still more, because the doors and windows of the chief rooms were big enough to allow the largest pictures to be carried in and out without risk of damage … here, very near what was to become for some days one of the most fiercely contested portions of the front line, was gathered together the rarest of all house – parties … among the very first arrivals, on the 18th of November [1942], were Uccello’s Battle of San Romano , the Cimabue Virgin Enthroned , the great Madonna of Giotto, and Botticelli’s Primavera .
For the grand sum of seventeen lire a day, Guido Masti, Sir George Sitwell’s retainer, wasgiven the task of protecting works of art valued at the time at three hundred and twenty million dollars. Yet he was far from alone in the castle. In 1943 Cesare Fasola, then curator of the Uffizi, reputedly walked across the battle lines to Montegufoni, where he took up a protective stance among the paintings he loved. More surrealistically, as many as two thousand refugees ‘swarmed into the cellars and dungeons from towns as far away as Empoli and Castel Fiorentino: for the old reputation of Montegufoni as a stronghold had revived in the popular mind’.
There were, then, for some ten or fourteen days, these two populations: the huddled crowds of homeless and terrified souls in the darkness below, where, at any rate, it was comparatively safe, and on the ground floor above, in grave danger, hundreds of world-famous pictures, piled against the sides of the walls, in the lofty painted rooms and halls… . Next, the Germans arrived, occupied the Castello, and turned out the refugees. They lived in the rooms above, and often threatened to destroy the pictures, but Professor Fasola and Guido Masti continued somehow to preserve them. When the German General, on entering the Castle, uttered menacing words about these great canvases being in his way and that they should be burnt, Guido said to him, as only an Italian, with the natural imaginative rhetoric of his race, could say:
‘These pictures belong not to one nation, but are the possession of the world.’
Remarkably, almost none of the works housed at Montegufoni were damaged; an exception was a circular Ghirlandaio that the Germans had used as a tabletop, and that was consequently stained with wine, food and coffee, and scarred by knives.
In his memoir The Art of Adventure, Eric Linklater later recalled arriving at Montegufoni with the BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, not long after the Germans had fled. ‘Some refugees had been sleeping in the castello,’ he wrote; ‘… cheerfully perceiving our excitement, they were making sounds of lively approval, and a couple of men began noisily to open the
because it is situated in a remote district, but, still more, because the doors and windows of the chief rooms were big enough to allow the largest pictures to be carried in and out without risk of damage … here, very near what was to become for some days one of the most fiercely contested portions of the front line, was gathered together the rarest of all house – parties … among the very first arrivals, on the 18th of November [1942], were Uccello’s Battle of San Romano , the Cimabue Virgin Enthroned , the great Madonna of Giotto, and Botticelli’s Primavera .
For the grand sum of seventeen lire a day, Guido Masti, Sir George Sitwell’s retainer, wasgiven the task of protecting works of art valued at the time at three hundred and twenty million dollars. Yet he was far from alone in the castle. In 1943 Cesare Fasola, then curator of the Uffizi, reputedly walked across the battle lines to Montegufoni, where he took up a protective stance among the paintings he loved. More surrealistically, as many as two thousand refugees ‘swarmed into the cellars and dungeons from towns as far away as Empoli and Castel Fiorentino: for the old reputation of Montegufoni as a stronghold had revived in the popular mind’.
There were, then, for some ten or fourteen days, these two populations: the huddled crowds of homeless and terrified souls in the darkness below, where, at any rate, it was comparatively safe, and on the ground floor above, in grave danger, hundreds of world-famous pictures, piled against the sides of the walls, in the lofty painted rooms and halls… . Next, the Germans arrived, occupied the Castello, and turned out the refugees. They lived in the rooms above, and often threatened to destroy the pictures, but Professor Fasola and Guido Masti continued somehow to preserve them. When the German General, on entering the Castle, uttered menacing words about these great canvases being in his way and that they should be burnt, Guido said to him, as only an Italian, with the natural imaginative rhetoric of his race, could say:
‘These pictures belong not to one nation, but are the possession of the world.’
Remarkably, almost none of the works housed at Montegufoni were damaged; an exception was a circular Ghirlandaio that the Germans had used as a tabletop, and that was consequently stained with wine, food and coffee, and scarred by knives.
In his memoir The Art of Adventure, Eric Linklater later recalled arriving at Montegufoni with the BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, not long after the Germans had fled. ‘Some refugees had been sleeping in the castello,’ he wrote; ‘… cheerfully perceiving our excitement, they were making sounds of lively approval, and a couple of men began noisily to open the
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