in Florence, the earth shakes and the authorities worry about the works of art

In the streets of Florence, the flow of tourists is almost uninterrupted, barely shaken by the earthquake that is shaking the city. At the bar of a Florentine café, opposite one of the many churches in the city, the researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Gilberto Saccorotti, is rather reassuring.

“Earthquakes cannot be predicted as you know. A sequence like this, of moderate magnitude, should lead us to raise our level of attention. But you should know that there are very few cases weak earthquakes followed by a strong tremor, he assures. The Aquila is one of the rare cases where this has happened.”

The Aquila exception was in 2009 in Abruzzo. Much of the city is destroyed and over 300 people die.

In Florence, from May 6 and the first earthquakes of magnitude 3.5, the municipality updated the civil protection plans. Elisabetta Meucci is in charge of the file at the town hall. She recalls that civil protection was born in Florence. “The very concept of civil protection in Italy was launched with the floods in Florence in 1966. It was there, at that precise moment, that we understood the need for a specific and targeted organization for this type of disaster which upsets a town.”

At the Accademia Gallery, visitors hurry, go through security checks before entering the museum and seeing, in the midst of a compact crowd, the David by Michelangelo. It is monitored, cleaned from head to toe every month and checked continuously, explains the director of the Academy’s gallery, Cecilia Hollberg.

“If there were to be an earthquake so strong that it knocked the 5,670kg off the ‘David’, I think we wouldn’t have to worry about anything else.”

Cecilia Hollberg, Director of the Academy Gallery

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“But of course we take care of all the works of art in this museum and we intervened on the weak points of the structurecontinues cecilia holberg. Part of the roof, in particular, she specifiesbecause if the ceiling collapsed, the whole building would collapse.” The work lasted a year and a half and ended barely three months ago. If the tremors were felt even in the museum, nothing moved.