The liberation of Florence

Before dawn on 4 August 1944 the first Allied patrols entered Florence. They came from the British Eighth Army – above all the South African 6th Armoured Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division of General Sidney Kirkman’s British XIII Corps. They occupied, however, only the part of the city on the south bank of the Arno, known as the Oltrarno. A few hours earlier, on the night of 3–4 August, German engineers had blown up every bridge over the river except the medieval Ponte Vecchio, and instead of it had demolished the old houses at both its ends.

Popular chronologies state that on 4 August Florence was liberated by the Allies and that the retreating Germans under “General” Albert Kesselring destroyed historic bridges and valuable buildings. This needs two qualifications. First, Albert Kesselring, the commander-in-chief of German forces in Italy, had been a field marshal (Generalfeldmarschall) since 1940, not a general. Second, 4 August was only the beginning of the city’s liberation: the Germans and Italian fascists held on in the historic centre on the north bank of the Arno for another week. Northern Florence was cleared only from 11 August onwards by Italian partisans, who launched an uprising in the city, and Allied units crossed the river in strength only around 13 August. Fighting in the outskirts went on until the end of the month.

The road to the Arno

After the Allies entered Rome on 4 June 1944, the commander of Allied forces in Italy, General Harold Alexander, pressed northwards so as not to give the Germans time to man the Gothic Line being prepared in the Apennines. In the west, General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army advanced along the coast: the French took Siena on 3 July and the Americans entered Livorno on 19 July. In the centre and the east, General Oliver Leese’s British Eighth Army was attacking, and its XIII Corps had Florence and the crossings over the Arno as its objective.

Kesselring was meanwhile conducting a delaying defence on successive lines: the Trasimene (Albert) Line, the Georg Line and finally the Paula Line, the last position on the hills before the city. It was held by the German I Parachute Corps of General Joachim Lemelsen’s Fourteenth Army, with the 4th Parachute Division in the front line. On 20 July General Kirkman ordered a “powerful thrust” towards the Arno crossings west of Florence. General Evered Poole’s South Africans, after hard fighting against mines and Tiger tanks, took the area around Greve in Chianti, and on 28 July the divisions of XIII Corps stood before the Paula Line.

The main attack on this line was made by General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division, supported on its left flank by the South Africans, who were to take the hills west of Impruneta and clear Route 2 into the city. The attack began on 30 July; on 31 July the artillery ran out of ammunition and Kirkman ordered a 24-hour pause. Tactical aircraft flew more than a hundred sorties a day against the German positions. By 3 August New Zealand, South African and British 4th Infantry Division columns were already descending from the hills towards the city.

An “open city” that was not one

The fate of Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, had been the subject of efforts since the spring of 1944. The Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, the German consul Gerhard Wolf and the Swiss consul Steinhäuslin urged both sides to spare the city as they had spared Rome. Around the turn of June and July the Germans declared Florence an open city – sources give different dates for this declaration – but the Allies never formally recognised it, and the Germans neither withdrew their troops from the city nor stopped using its roads and bridges to supply the front. According to Florentine historians, both sides therefore considered themselves released from any obligations.

General Alexander nevertheless let it be known that he did not intend to fight in Florence itself, and XIII Corps was ordered to bypass the city rather than storm it. The Germans meanwhile prepared a defence on the line of the Arno. On 29 July the German command declared a state of emergency in the city and ordered the houses along both banks of the river to be vacated; according to Italian studies, some 150,000 people had to move out. Many of them found shelter in the Palazzo Pitti and in churches. On 30 July the Germans destroyed the power station and damaged the waterworks – the city was left without electricity or water. The inhabitants were forbidden to go out into the streets.

The night of 3–4 August

On the night of 3–4 August a series of tremendous explosions rang out over the city. At dawn it turned out that German engineers had blown up all of Florence’s bridges over the Arno: the Ponte alle Grazie, the Ponte alla Carraia, the Ponte San Niccolò, the Ponte alla Vittoria and – what most distressed art historians – the Renaissance Ponte Santa Trinita, built in 1567–1569 to a design by Bartolomeo Ammannati. The railway bridges were destroyed too.

Only the Ponte Vecchio survived, a mid-14th-century bridge lined with goldsmiths’ shops and carrying the Vasari Corridor linking the Palazzo Vecchio with the Palazzo Pitti. The Germans did not, however, spare it out of disinterested motives. To prevent a crossing, they blew up the medieval buildings at either end – on the north side Por Santa Maria and part of the Lungarno Acciaiuoli, on the south side Borgo San Jacopo, the beginning of Via Guicciardini and part of Via de’ Bardi. The rubble blocked the approaches to the bridge, and in the following days they were sown with hundreds of mines.

Who saved the Ponte Vecchio remains a matter of dispute to this day. According to the most commonly repeated version, the decision was made by Hitler himself, who had seen the bridge during his visit to Florence in May 1938, and Consul Wolf had lobbied for it to be spared; Kesselring is said to have refused to save any other bridge until the Allies recognised Florence as an open city. Wolf is commemorated today by a plaque on the bridge. Italian studies also record later accounts according to which local people saved the bridge by disabling the charges, but these are not confirmed by documents.

The first patrols in the city

Early on the morning of 4 August the forward units of the XIII Corps divisions reached the southern outskirts and the Porta Romana, the gate on the road from Siena. They found that no bridge capable of carrying military vehicles remained. According to the history of the South African 6th Armoured Division, a patrol of the Imperial Light Horse and the Kimberley Regiment reached the Ponte Vecchio and at about four in the morning, under heavy fire, crossed the rubble to the other bank – the first Allied soldiers in the centre of Florence. That same morning New Zealand and British patrols also entered the southern districts; different units claim precedence in their histories. The patrols could not, however, hold on to the north bank, which was still in the hands of German paratroopers and Italian fascists.

Masterpieces in Tuscan villas

A particular concern of both sides – and later a subject of propaganda – was the collections of the Florentine museums. As early as 1940–1943 the Italian conservation authorities, headed by the director of the Uffizi Gallery, Giovanni Poggi, had moved the most valuable paintings and sculptures to several dozen villas, castles and monasteries in the Tuscan countryside to protect them from bombing. According to art-historical accounts, 261 works were hidden in the castle of Montegufoni near Montespertoli alone, among them Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi.

When the front passed through Tuscany, these hiding places found themselves on the battle line. Some of the repositories, Montegufoni among them, were found at the end of July by advancing Allied soldiers; the collections were taken in hand by officers of the Allied monuments protection service (the so-called Monuments Men), among them the American Frederick Hartt, later an honorary citizen of Florence. From other repositories German units – invoking the need to protect the works from the fighting – took several hundred paintings and sculptures north to South Tyrol (PL). The Allies found them there only after the surrender of the German forces in Italy in May 1945, and they returned to Florence in the summer of that year.

The uprising and the fighting for the north bank

Between 4 and 11 August Florence was a city divided by its river. On the south bank, in the Oltrarno, the Allies made contact with the Tuscan Committee of National Liberation (CTLN) – the regional branch of the National Liberation Committee – and with the commanders of the partisan Garibaldi Brigades, who had come down from the hills into the city. The partisans cleared the San Frediano, Santo Spirito and San Niccolò districts of snipers, while the committee organised a field hospital, burials of the dead and shelter for families from the blown-up houses. On 8 August the commander of the Arno partisan division, Aligi Barducci (“Potente”), was mortally wounded by a German mortar bomb; he died the next day, and the division took his nom de guerre.

Early on the morning of 11 August the Germans withdrew their main forces from the centre to the line of the Mugnone stream on the northern outskirts. At six in the morning the CTLN gave the order for the uprising; the signal was the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio, known as the Martinella, followed by the bell of the Bargello. The partisans crossed the Ponte Vecchio and the rubble and took the Palazzo Vecchio and the prefecture in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. The committee took power in the city and appointed an administration with the Socialist Gaetano Pieraccini as mayor and two deputies – a Communist and a Christian Democrat. The Allies confirmed these appointments; for the first time in the Italian campaign the city authorities had been chosen by the Resistance rather than by the Allied military authorities.

The fighting did not end on 11 August. Several hundred snipers remained on the rooftops and at the windows – according to Italian studies, mainly young volunteers from the fascist Italian Social Republic – firing at partisans, soldiers and passers-by. Between 11 and 23 August the partisans hunted them down street by street; those captured were often shot on the spot. The Allied units, whose priority was supplying the front, crossed the Arno in greater strength only around 13 August, after engineers had built bridges. On the northern line of the Mugnone the partisans and the Germans fought until the end of the month; Fiesole was liberated on 1 September, and the last German positions on Monte Morello were abandoned on 7 September.

Losses

Florence escaped the fate of Cassino or Ortona – no street fighting with heavy artillery and aircraft was waged for it – but the price was high. According to estimates by Florentine historians, at least 600 civilians were killed and about 2,000 wounded while the front passed through, from July to the beginning of September 1944; several hundred more victims had been claimed by earlier Allied air raids on the railway junction and the outskirts. The partisans lost 205 killed, a dozen or so missing and about 400 wounded in the fighting for the city. Together with the bridges and the houses by the Ponte Vecchio, part of the medieval townscape along the Arno was lost, and for several weeks the city lived without running water, electricity or regular supplies.

Place in the war

The entry into Florence concluded the Allies’ summer pursuit through central Italy. In the two months since the capture of Rome, Alexander’s armies had advanced more than 200 kilometres, but they had failed to destroy Kesselring’s forces, which withdrew in good order to fortifications in the Apennines that had been in preparation for months. The front settled on the Arno, from Pisa through Florence towards the upper reaches of the river, and behind it, a few dozen kilometres to the north, lay the Gothic Line. At the same time the Allied forces in Italy were weakened by the departure of seven divisions – the US VI Corps and the French Expeditionary Corps – for the invasion of southern France. Florence itself soon became a rear base and road hub for the offensive against the Gothic Line, though Alexander shifted its main weight to the Adriatic coast.

After the war the city rebuilt its bridges. The Ponte Santa Trinita was re-erected in 1955–1958 “as it was and where it was”, largely from the original stones recovered from the bed of the Arno. The houses by the Ponte Vecchio were rebuilt in forms combining old and modern architecture. Consul Gerhard Wolf was made an honorary citizen of Florence in 1955, and the uprising of 11 August became one of the symbols of the Italian Resistance. In 1947 Kesselring was sentenced to death by a British military court in Venice for war crimes against the Italian population, including the Ardeatine Caves massacre; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1952 the field marshal was released.