After much hunting, I found this at the Newberry Library book sale for 75 cents!

Definitely worth the wait and the search!

Friday, November 4. . . . A tumultuous mass ofwater stretches from bank to bank, perhaps four feet below the tops of the twenty-five-foot walls, a snarling brown torrent of terrific velocity, spiraling in whirlpools and countercurrents that send waves running backward; and its color is a rich brown, a boiling caffè-latte brown streaked with crests the color of dirty cream.

And so it begins. The shops flooded, goods ruined. Mud everywhere, 500,000 tons of it. Buildings gutted, filled with rotted garbage and sewage, walls falling. And the art, the books, the frescoes. No one has flood insurance.

They come. The angeli del fango. The young, "immediately recognizable on the streets, not only by their youth and their long strides, but because tey are muddier than anybody else and their faces are so confident. They wear their mud as a badge of honor, and nobody had better suggest their cleaning it off." They move the books and the artwork to safety, where the restorers will go to work.

People flee the city, and come back. Relief funds come (along with bureaucracy!). Though nearly two hundred have died, there have been no cases of cholera or typhoid. A month later, there is an opera at the Tetro Comunale, costumes lent by La Scala, no scenery. Bisogna molta molta pazienza, is the refrain throughout the city.

Kressman's journal ends on Saturday, March 4, four months after the flood. "The lilies have recently been drowned, but like all hardy flowers with their roots in the muck, they are coming into undiscouraged bloom again." So with the city.

One month after I bought this book, Hurricane Katrina hit, levees broke, and New Orleans drowned, un'altra città devastata. Si ricomincia, come Firenze? Spero.