Frammenti non dimenticati

Florence, 1966

On 4 November 1966 the Arno river, that runs through Florence, burst its banks and flooded the city. Sixty years later, Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella remembers the flood with an exhibition at its historic home in Via della Scala 16 and by supporting the restoration of Francesco Botticini’s Saint Sebastian, a work belonging to the Uffizi Galleries that the water severely damaged.

The exhibition “Frammenti non dimenticati. Firenze, 1966” is open to the public from 16 October to 22 November 2026. It presents the Saint Sebastian before its restoration, alongside photographs and documents of the flood and objects from the Officina’s Archive and collections.

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Florence, 4 November 1966

On 4 November 1966, after days of heavy rain, the Arno river burst its banks and flooded the city. By morning, the waters had reached the city centre and spread through the districts on both banks, rising up to four metres (13 ft) in certain areas. Fuel oil, used for heating at the time, spilled from defective systems and mixed with the water, making the damage worse. When the river receded on 6 November, it left behind about 600,000 tonnes (660,000 US tons) of mud.

Thousands of works of art and more than a million books were damaged: it remains one of the deepest wounds in Florence’s history.

Young volunteers came from across Italy and around the world to dig out the mud and carry books and works of art to safety. Florence still remembers them as “mud angels”, Angeli del Fango.

The flood at Via della Scala

Via della Scala 16 is the home of Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, in Florence since 1221. In 1966, the complex also housed production, with its laboratories and storerooms, alongside the archive and the historic rooms open to the public.

When the Arno overflowed, the flood reached this site, too. Floors, plaster and decoration were compromised, and raw materials, tools and containers were covered in a thick, oily layer.

Much of the Officina’s memory was damaged as well: the historic archive and the library, along with photographic plates, printing matrices and labels. What remains still bears the marks of those days, or has since been restored. Some of it is now on view in the exhibition.

“Saint Sebastian" and the exhibition

Francesco Botticini’s Saint Sebastian is a panel painting dated between 1475 and 1480 and belonging to the Uffizi Galleries. In November 1966 it was located in a restoration laboratory on the ground floor of the Uffizi, where the water and mud reached it.

The damage was severe: the paint broke apart while the wood started to shrink. To save it, in 1967 restorers chose to detach the paint from the original panel and transfer it to a new support. The saint’s face was pieced back together from the recovered fragments. Today the work is kept at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence’s institute for restoration.

Sixty years after the flood, the Officina is supporting the restoration of Saint Sebastian, whose technical direction will be entrusted to the Opificio. The intervention will not alter the changes the painting has already undergone. But this decision recognises this work’s beauty and its value, in the form history has left it. Once complete, the Saint Sebastian will return to the Uffizi.

Before its restoration begins, the painting is on view at Via della Scala 16 in the exhibition “Frammenti non dimenticati. Firenze, 1966”, alongside photographs of the flood and documents and objects from the Officina’s archive, spanning the eighteenth century to the 1960s. Some still show traces of the mud, while others have been restored.