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The Destruction of Florence in the Second World War

On August 3, 1944, before abandoning the city pursued by the Anglo-American troops, the Germans mined all the bridges across the Arno. The only exception was the Ponte Vecchio, saved because particularly dear to the romantic taste of German culture for the picturesque, which they blocked with rubble from large areas of urban fabric at the two bridgeheads to the north and south.

After a national competition (1946), between 1948 and 1970, the area around the bridge was reconstructed. Despite high level debate over the relationship between new and old, the operation turned into a shabby game of vanity, a grotesque dance of allusions to the old which turned out to be parodies, characterised by a misunderstood idea of the picturesque and of local constructional, material and formal traditions. The “modernist” solution involving breaking up and fragmenting the structure of the groups of buildings, also responsible for great damage in other Italian cities, was even more negative in an urban context such as Florence, for centuries characterised precisely by the continuity of the built fabric.

Only the skill of Giovanni Michelucci managed to redeem that solution, playing elegantly with the transitions between floors staggered by just a few centimetres in the apartment block in Via Guicciardini at the corner with Via dello Sprone. During the following few years, the erroneous assumption in the presumed equation modernity = break with the surroundings was to be repeated in other developments in the city centre - fortunately few, but nevertheless serious - and was also to become the rule in the new expansions.

The theory supporting the legitimacy of “modern” development in an old context, appealing to the freedom of expression of contemporary creativity, is only apparently culturally progressive. Contemporary creativity can and must express itself on other occasions and in other contexts - in particular, in the improvement of suburban areas - and never through the destruction or alteration of the context of a historically stratified city as it has come down to us.

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