On November 4, 1966, Florence experienced the most devastating flood of its entire history, which crippled the city and destroyed many of the world’s art treasures. On that day, Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna, a twenty-six-year-old American artist living in Florence, went out into the flooded streets and photographed the dramatic unfolding events.
Kraczyna was awarded the Fiorino d’Oro—the highest honor of the City of Florence—for ten of those photographs. This book presents, for the first time, a selection of eighty-four of Kraczyna’s flood photographs, taken on that tragic day and in the days that followed, as the city tried to deal with the immense disaster.
Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna is an internationally known artist, who has had 128 one-man exhibitions in five continents, and whose work is also preserved in the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He lives and works in Florence, and teaches for Syracuse University in Florence.
December 2006
