Uffizi: A Painting, A Bombing, A Restoration

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class | Episode Summary

Episode Title: Uffizi: A Painting, A Bombing, A Restoration
Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy V. Wilson
Date: May 18, 2026
Podcast: Stuff You Missed in History Class (iHeartPodcasts)

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Episode Overview

In this engaging and poignant episode, Holly and Tracy explore the intertwined stories of art, tragedy, and resilience centered around the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Anchored by Holly’s recent trip to the museum, the episode dives into the little-known 1993 mafia bombing of the Uffizi, its devastating impact on the gallery and several artworks (notably paintings by Bartolomeo Manfredi), and the remarkable restoration efforts that followed. The episode unfolds in three main parts: Manfredi’s life and works, the 1993 bombing and its context, and the decades-long journey to restore art and memory in the aftermath.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Artist: Bartolomeo Manfredi (04:31 – 11:14)

• Background: Manfredi, born in Ostiano in 1582, apprenticed as a boy likely under Cristoforo Roncalli (Pomarancho), possibly in Mantua.
• Caravaggio Connection: He's thought to have been associated with Caravaggio. At the 1603 libel trial of Caravaggio, a “Bartolomeo Cristofori” is mentioned, likely Manfredi himself (05:34).
  • Holly: “They are so filthy that they made even me… gasp aloud. I was like, oh, my goodness… They’re filthy.” (06:05)
• Artistic Legacy: Considered the most prominent of the Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio’s style). His work was often mistaken for Caravaggio’s due to stylistic similarity.
  • Tracy: “Manfredi was so studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been numerous times that his work has been mistaken for Caravaggio’s…” (07:41)
• Key Painting – Cupid Chastised: Initially attributed to Caravaggio, later correctly assigned to Manfredi. Now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Significant Work – The Card Players: Painted between 1616–1618, this composition depicting men gambling is central to this episode, as it suffered severely in the 1993 bombing.

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2. The 1993 Uffizi Bombing (14:07 – 28:21)

The Attack

• Event: Early morning, May 27, 1993—a Fiat van packed with 500 pounds of explosives detonates on Via de’ Georgofili, adjacent to the Uffizi and the historic Giorgofili Academy’s Torre de’ Pulci.
  • Tracy: “A lot of residents… came out… saw terrifying devastation. The Academy and the tower were both badly damaged…” (16:00)
• Human Toll: Five people killed—four from one family living in the Torre de Pulci and a student, Dario Cappellecchio. Significant loss for the local and art communities.
• Damage:
  • Academia, the tower, and significant parts of the Uffizi, including the Vasari Corridor, were heavily damaged.
  • “An estimated 1/4 of the Uffizi collection was affected... 173 paintings and 56 sculptures in various states of damage and destruction.” (18:07)
  • Among works considered permanent losses: Manfredi’s The Card Players and The Concert, and Gerardo Della Notti’s Adoration of the Shepherds.

Immediate Response & Public Outcry

• Public Reaction: Florence unites in protest, 20,000+ people striking and rallying “against violence and intimidation.” (22:37)
• Investigation & Motive:
  • Connections drawn to mafia retaliation. Similarities to a near-contemporaneous bombing in Rome involving the same kind of van and explosives (23:20).
  • Motive: Retaliation for recent government crackdowns on mafia figures—targeting art as a way to threaten the Italian economy and spirit.
    • Tracy: “The crime syndicate sent the message that it could strike at Italy’s art and history… things that could not be replaced.” (24:07)
  • In 1998, several mafia bosses were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The Uffizi Pre-Bombing

• Existing Challenges: Chronic staff shortages, overwhelming crowds, infrastructure issues, and bureaucratic hurdles hampered museum operations even before the bombing.
  • Holly: “They were only allowed seven curators for their massive and historically significant collection…” (26:53)
  • Bureaucratic mismanagement led to stalling of crucial infrastructure improvements.

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3. Restoration: Art, Memory & Resilience (31:04 – 41:43)

Initial Restoration Efforts

• Immediate Aftermath: Museum staff mobilized with incredible urgency and care, scavenging every possible fragment from the wreckage.
  • Holly: “Staff members carefully crawled the floors… to collect every possible piece... pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a painting versus a sculpture versus… the building.” (31:04)
• Reopening: Within 20 days, the museum partially reopened, an effort lauded for its organization—becoming a model for post-disaster recovery in museums.

The Long Road to Restoring The Card Players

• Other Works:
  • The Concert (Manfredi): Partially restored shortly after the attack.
  • Adoration of the Shepherds: Restored in 2003.
• The Card Players:
  • So thoroughly shredded, the painting was set aside for decades. “Hundreds of tiny, fragmented pieces… covered with rice paper to protect it.” (34:12)
  • Rediscovered in 2014 by restorer Daniela Lippi, who saw potential despite the daunting challenge.
    • Lippi: “The fragment with the playing cards stood out. Somehow, the identifying element… had survived.” (35:39)
  • Restoration was enabled by a €26,000 crowdfunding effort, and innovative use of technology: high-res photos (donated by Scala Archives), digital projection, and painstaking manual matching.

Results & Legacy

• Restoration Outcome: About 30% of the original painting was reconstructed, displayed alongside unused fragments in a custom folder—all serving as both artwork and historical document.
  • Lippi (via Tracy): “The work thus recovered is not brought back to an intact state, but has become a document, a memory, and warning of that terrible affront.” (39:04)
• Memorialization:
  • The story of the restoration and the attack is now ingrained in the museum experience, with the restored works displayed on bombing anniversaries.
  • Uffizi’s director Eike Schmidt reflected on the deeper meaning:
    • “For Florence, Italy and the world, it was such an important event of terror. We can’t bring back to life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings, but we can build a memorial for culture against violence and terror.” (40:44)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the 1993 devastation
  • NYT’s Michael Kimmelman: “Through that enormous opening in the wall, the view is breathtaking and horrific… the shattered red tile roofs… the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which a family killed in the explosion used to live. A few household belongings can still be seen…” (21:18)
• On Lippi’s response to seeing the fragments
  • Lippi: “Somehow, the identifying element of the represented subject had survived. But the fragments… would become dust if left in that envelope. I thought that through my work, I could contribute… to saving a record of that dramatic event.” (35:39)
• On restoration as memorial
  • Director Eike Schmidt: “We can't bring back to life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings, but we can build a memorial for culture against violence and terror.” (40:44)
• On the importance of making art, in listener mail
  • Holly: “I want everybody to please make art in whatever way they like because I think it's really good for your soul... It makes your brain work in a new way that we're not given the opportunity to do all the time, where you're just kind of playing—low stakes. Art is the best for your mind, in my opinion.” (44:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp (MM:SS) | |------------------------------------------------------|---------------------| | Holly’s Uffizi inspiration and episode structure | 02:25 – 04:31 | | Life and work of Bartolomeo Manfredi | 04:31 – 11:14 | | The 1993 Uffizi bombing: event and immediate impact | 14:07 – 22:11 | | Public and investigative aftermath | 22:11 – 24:07 | | Uffizi pre-bombing: staff and bureaucratic challenges| 25:07 – 27:46 | | Immediate restoration response | 31:04 – 34:12 | | The saga of restoring The Card Players | 34:12 – 40:44 | | Restoration as memorial, ongoing legacy | 40:44 – 41:54 | | Reflections on making art (listener mail) | 42:32 – 45:48 |

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Tone and Takeaways

The episode is a testament to the resilience of cultural institutions, the meticulous determination of restorers, and the enduring significance of art in public and personal memory. Holly and Tracy blend humor, reverence, and candor in sharing a story where tragedy amplifies the beauty of restoration—not just of canvases, but of cultural heritage and collective healing.

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For Listeners

This episode offers not only a window into a pivotal yet often overshadowed moment in art history, but also a reflection on why, how, and for whom art endures. Whether you’re an art lover, a history buff, or simply someone seeking stories of hope and recovery, the journey from destruction to restoration at the Uffizi is unforgettable.

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For further images, historical documents, and specifics on the restoration, visit the Uffizi’s official website or the linked resources mentioned in the show notes.

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Holly Frey]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Holly Frey]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Frey]

Oh Tracy, I just got back from Italy.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I know you did. You seemed so happy while you were there.

[Holly Frey]

I didn't want to Leave. It was a pretty great trip. And while I did actually bring materials to work on an episode while I was traveling, because, you know, long flights and stuff, I got sidetracked by something else because I saw something while I was in Italy that kind of shifted all my gears, and I got really obsessed with it. So since that was the only thing I could think about, it became an episode. So for setup, if you visit the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, and if you follow the museum's suggested path, which in and of itself is an adventure, there is this moment where you turn a corner into a staircase. And in the sort of transitional vaulted ceiling that's over the staircase, just as you're entering it, there is a discolored imprint of a window. Like, it almost looks like somebody, like, drew a window on the staircase. But then to the right of that staircase, on the wall, there is a small plaque, and the English version of it reads, the vault bears the mark of a window blown by the force of the mafia bomb on May 27, 1993. So I was instantly riveted, and I looked it up. I had a vague recollection of this event from when it happened, but I didn't remember a whole lot of the details around it. And I was not aware that Feetsi is continually incorporating that story into its own story and the way it presents art. So I was on this long journey. It was quite delicious. And that became this episode. We are gonna kind of have this in three parts. We're gonna start by talking about a particular artist and his work, and then we are gonna talk about the context of that bombing, and then the work that's been done, some of it pretty recently, to recover from that attack and memorialize the tragedy and piece together a little bit of lost history. So we are gonna start with Bartolomeo Manfredi.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Bartolomeo manfredi was born August 25, 1582, in Ostiano, Italy. That's in the province of Cremona in the Lombardy region. It's adjacent to the Mantua province. And sometimes you will find his place of birth listed as Mantua. We don't know a whole lot more about his early life than that. He is said to have become an apprentice or a student to the Mannerist painter Cristoforo Roncalli, also known as Pomorancho. When he was a boy, Pomarancho lived and worked in Rome and had been chosen to create some of the decoration for St. Peter's Basilica. This also is a fragmentary piece of information. Writing in 1987. For the Burlington Magazine, Raffaella Morselli noted that Pomerasio was in Mantua in 1595. He was actually imprisoned there briefly, and that might have been where he came into contact with Bartolomeo, who would have been 13.

[Holly Frey]

It is unclear if Manfredi ever studied with Caravaggio, although he certainly became associated with the older artist's work. In 1603, Caravaggio was sued for libel by rival painter Giovanni Baglione after critical and unflattering poems that Caravaggio wrote about Baglione had circulated throughout Rome. I had originally been planning to include some of these poems or an excerpt from them in their translation, but they are so filthy that they made even me, a person, very comfortable with salty and filthy language that many other people would find upsetting. I gasped aloud. I was like, oh, my goodness. Like, my husband ran down the stairs to see if I was okay. They're filthy. But the important thing is that during this libel trial, a servant of Caravaggio's is mentioned as actually being the one who passed out the copies of those poems. And that servant is named in the record as Bartolomeo Cristifori. So this has led to some speculation, and I think a pretty well grounded idea that this is actually a reference to Bartolomeo Manfredi, and it is using the first name of his teacher, Pommarancio, as his last name. But again, this is still a detail that's very much about piecing together clues rather than something we can say with certainty. Even if Bartolomeo did study with Caravaggio, it could not have been for very long, because the renowned painter famously had to leave Rome in 1606amid murder accusations after a brawl that left Ranuccio Tomasoni dead. The actual cause of that brawl is still debated. There are some different versions of it you may hear, but Caravaggio was found guilty and he was sentenced to death in absentia. He died in the Tuscany town of Porto Ercole, while he was actually headed back to Rome, apparently in search of a pardon from Naples, where he had been living. And that happened in 1610.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Bertolomeo Manfredi is often described as a Caravaggio follower, which sort of straddles the fence on the issue of whether he was his student. And he became the most well known among the Caravaggisti. That's the painters that emulated both the style and the techniques of Caravaggio. Manfredi was so studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been numerous times that his work has been mistaken For Caravaggio's, I definitely, when Holly sent me this outline and I googled to see what some of this art looked like, there were a couple of things that immediately made me go, oh, that looks like Caravaggio. One such example is a painting known as Cupid Chastised. This is an image of the naked adolescent Cupid being whipped by Mars, God of war, Venus. Cupid's mother is attempting to intercede and to stop Mars. So this is a violent image with a dramatic visual contrast due to the light source being depicted exclusively from the left side of the painting.

[Holly Frey]

According to Alfred Moore, writing for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985, when Cupid chastised first hit the radar of the wider art world outside of Italy, it was in 1937, and at that point it was touted as a Caravaggio that had been newly discovered. And although art experts quickly determined that it was in fact the work of Manfredi, that incorrect Caravaggio attribution continued to circulate. People kept saying it was by him. Today, the provenance of the work, which is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, is clearly laid out from the time the painting was commissioned in March of 1613. That more detailed account of the painting's history became possible in part due to the discovery of two inventory lists that were in the Vatican Vatican archives that mentioned the painting. They weren't part of the Vatican collection. They were just pieces the archives had that were collections of other people in Rome. That information in those lists was then cross referenced with other contemporary mentions of the painting in order to create this reliable timeline.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By 1613, when that painting was commissioned, Manfredi was well established. He was clearly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, but he doesn't appear to have been at all like him. In temperament. He was quiet. He didn't socialize very much. He took mainly private commissions instead of seeking out important public jobs. Painting mostly multi character tableau Some of his work is religious in subject. A lot of it is often referred to as low life, meaning everyday people doing things like drinking in taverns, playing cards or making music. One such work is the painting the Card Players, sometimes also called Soldiers Playing Cards, which Manfredi completed sometime between 1616 and 1618. In this image, a group of men are at a table in a variety of positions. Some are sitting, some are standing. One is sitting on the edge of the table. They are betting on a card game called Zarro, which was popular at the end of the 16th century. This painting employs the technique known as chiaroscuro. That's the creation of depth and drama through a contrast of light and dark, with those elements being light and dark within the composition. This painting will become a central character later on in this episode.

[Holly Frey]

Manfredi died quite young. He was only 40 when he passed. We don't have a lot of information about his death other than the date, which was December 12, 1622, in Rome.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Coming up, we are going to shift our focus to the bombing that took place in Florence in 1993. First, though, we will pause for a sponsor break

[Holly Frey]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Holly Frey]

Unlike the people we normally talk about on the show, we are living in a time when Internet connectivity is a standard part of life for most people and there is literally no way we could research and prepare our podcast without the Internet. If connectivity goes down for me, it can be really hard to make up that lost time. And for businesses, Internet connectivity is even more of a necessity. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast and reliable Internet, advanced Wi, Fi, phone, TV and mobile services. Spectrum business offers 100% US based customer support and they do it 24 7. That means you can always stay up and running no matter what hours your business keeps. Spectrum Business also will tailor connectivity solutions just for you. They will put a package together that is built for your business budget. Millions of business owners rely on Spectrum Business to keep them connected, so visit spectrum.combusiness to learn more. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. At 1:04am on May 27, 1993, the City of Florence was rocked by a massive explosion on Via de Giorgofili. That's a street that runs mostly north away from the Arno river, right next to the Uffizi Gallery complex. On that side of the complex, in addition to gallery buildings, are the Giorgofili Academy, which is a historic educational institution. Its housed records and study of agriculture, forestry and economy and the Torre de Pulci, a 14th century tower that is used by the Giorgofili Academy for both offices and residences.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

A lot of residents of the city came out of their homes to see what had happened and they saw terrifying devastation. The Academy and the tower were both badly damaged, as were sections of the art galleries. A theory spread that a gas tank may have exploded, but as first responders got to the scene, they found the epicenter. There was a massive crater in Via de Giogofili and they realized that the cause of this was not a gas explosion but a car bomb. A Fiat van filled with an estimated 500 pounds of explosives had been parked on the street and then left to detonate. That number was initially reported as roughly 200 pounds, but that was revised upward over the years based on the intensity of the explosion. While the nighttime museum staff had not been on the side of the gallery that faced this street, there were people in the Torre del Puchi. Five people were tragically killed. One was a student named Dario Cappellicchio, who died in a fire that started after the bombing. And the remaining four were a family who were buried in the collapsed tower. Angela Necconi was the caretaker of the tower, and her husband, Fabrizio Neccione, and their two very young daughters, Nadia and Caterina, lived there as well. And the whole family was killed.

[Holly Frey]

The museum damage was extensive. In addition to the building itself, the Vasari Corridor was badly damaged. It was one of the most damaged pieces of architecture. So that structure is a 750 meter long elevated enclosed walkway. And it was built, built in 1565 by Giorgio Vasari, so that members of the Medici family could travel from Palazzo Pitti to Palazzo Vecchio on the other side of the Arno river, crossing alongside the bridge known as Ponte Vecchio. This provided the Medicis a way to make that crossing without having to deal with commoners or without compromising their safety. The Via Lambartesca, the street that runs perpendicular to the Via de Giorgiofili, was covered in rubble.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There was a lot of damage to works of art. A handful of their most famous pieces had a bulletproof glass covering that protect them from projectile debris. But the vast majority did not. An estimated 1/4 of the Uffizi collection was affected. According to their website. The final count was 173 paintings and 56 sculptures in various states of damage and destruction. In addition to that, because the building had so much damage, a lot of works had to be quickly moved to other parts of the facility. Leaving them where they were would have exposed them to the elements. The unharmed room where Botticelli's Venus and Primavera are housed became the de facto landing place for a lot of the art that needed to be moved. That led reporters to note that it became the most impressive room of art in the world. The museum staff and investigators took photos to document everything. You can see a lot of those photos online at the Fizi website as well. That page will also be linked from our show notes. At the time, there were three paintings that were considered to be permanent losses. Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerardo dell' I Noti and two by Bartolomeo Manfredi. They were the concert and the card players.

[Holly Frey]

So just like the corridor, Vasari also designed the main Uffizi building. That name actually just means offices because it was built to house the various governmental divisions that were operating under Cosimo I de Medici. Cosimo tapped Giorgio Vasari to design this building in 1560, but Vasari died in 1574, and the building was not yet finished. And at that point, Bernardo Buon Talenti took up the project. Early on in the building's existence, once it had been finished, the top floor of it was used mostly to house the impressive Medici art collection. They were, as has come up on the show many times before, significant patrons of the arts. And they commissioned a lot of paintings and sculptures that are very famous today. Over time, the Medici art collection grew and it took up more space. And really that became the sole purpose of the Uffizi was to house that collection. Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, born in 1691, became the last of the Medici line. And in a very famous and important move, she signed what was known as the family pact. And that basically left the Uffizi Museum to the government of Tuscany. And it provided for the entire art collection to remain in the Uffizi in perpetuity and and to be made open to the public. So she basically made it into a public museum. This cemented the reputation of Florence as a nexus of great art, and it was also something that was designed to draw visitors to the city and keep its economy strong. So the damage that the uffizi sustained in 1993 was something that the entire city felt very deeply, because that museum is a work of art in and of itself, like the building is considered a work of art, and it is also the heart of the culture and the identity of Florence.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times traveled to Florence to report on the situation several weeks after the fact, and his description was printed in papers around the world. One section describes a gallery that looked over the street where the car had been parked, and then reads quote through that enormous opening in the wall. The view is breathtaking and horrific, set against the backdrop of the soft Tuscan hills and the great dome. The that Brunelleschi designed for the cathedral are the shattered red tile roofs of the buildings across the street from the Uffizi and the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which a family killed in the explosion used to live. A few household belongings can still be seen on what remains of the tower's top floor, reduced to barely more than A roofless platform. Historical agricultural archives housed in the tower were destroyed.

[Holly Frey]

Initially, there was no real sense of who the perpetrator or perpetrators might be, why they may have targeted the museum. And even if the museum was the actual target. The Uffizi is a squared off U shaped building with a courtyard. So if someone really wanted to damage it, that courtyard would have been the optimal place to park the explosives. But the car bomb was parked on the exterior part of the ultimate.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The incident sparked both rumors and outrage. The day after the bombing, labor unions in Florence called a four hour strike during which more than 20,000 people took to the streets in a demonstration to send the message that the city was united against violence and intimidation. There were suspicions about the perpetrator being part of organized crime, or even an inside job initiated by corruption. Government officials quote, people might seem calm, but they're angry. This is not crime, it is politics. There is a war between people who want change and people who don't want to lose power. And the only way is to throw bombs and frighten people away from change.

[Holly Frey]

The prevailing theory from early on among investigators was that the Mafia was involved. Just a few weeks earlier, there had been an attack in Rome against television talk show host Maurizio Costanzo after he aired anti Mafia pieces on his show. The journalists survived that attack thanks to lucky timing, but 23 people were injured, including his driver, and an estimated 100 families lost their homes in that blast. But the most important details of the Rome bombing, in terms of how it related to the Sufizi situation, were that the explosives used in that bomb in Rome were the same as the ones used in Florence. And they had been packed into a Fiat van, just like the vehicle outside the Uffizi.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The motive for the attack on the Uffizi was retaliation. In the months and weeks leading up to the explosion, Italian authorities had initiated a huge crackdown on Mafia activity and had arrested hundreds of people in the process, including some very high ranking members of the criminal organization. Many of those men were made examples of. Authorities put them in solitary confinement to show that they could cut them off from the power structures that they depended on. And in response, the crime syndicate sent the message that it could strike at Italy's art and history, things that could not be replaced. That is in and of itself horrific, but could also kneecap the Italian economy, which really depends on the tourism money that museums and historical architecture generate. It took a year for authorities to conclusively tie the Mafia to the bomb. And finally, in 1998, several high ranking bosses within the organization were sentenced to life in prison for it.

[Holly Frey]

Stepping away from the horrific bombing, Uffizi was having some trouble already in the months before the blast, for reasons that did not have to do with the criminal underworld. In March 1993, an article from Reuters ran under the title Push Comes to shove at Italy's Uffizi. Too many visitors, too little staff at famed museum and that write up reported that the museum had become so popular without the support to run it, that quote, on average, a third of the gallery's rooms are closed during the tourist season because of a chronic staff shortage. That meant that famous works like those of Botticelli, the things that were drawing people to the museum, were often off limits because that room, like others, was closed to manage crowdflow to, because no one was available to just keep an eye on the art.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This was an issue that government officials were, according to the article, frustrated by Antonio Palucci, who was the municipal supervisor over Florence's museums at the time, gave a statement to journalist John Falane that evidenced his frustration at the way people had to elbow one another just to get a look at the art. Quote, the pushing and shoving in the galleries is a barbarity. Visiting a museum today has become a strain for museum guards and directors. It's like trying to hold a trench with fewer and fewer soldiers in the face of an ever bigger offensive. The museum had reached a point where it would sometimes borrow guards from other museums to try to keep up with demand. But that meant that those other museums often had to close. There were proposals in discussion to ban school groups as one way to try to mitigate the problem.

[Holly Frey]

The head of the Uffizi at the time, Anna Maria Petriolo Tofani, told the press that the problem stemmed from the fact that while bureaucrats in Rome were happy to accept the income that the Uffizi generated, they micromanaged every move the museum tried to make to improve the visitor experience and ensure proper running and upkeep of the facility. And they were not approving any kind of spending. So at the time, the Uffizi was estimated to generate about $5.5 million in income each year, and yet they were only allowed seven curators for their massive and historically significant collection. Other branches of their staff were similarly disproportionately small for what they were trying to do. The allocated budget for its upkeep was tight enough that, according to newspaper reports, staff had to buy their own stamps and office supplies.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the years just before the attack, the museum proposed a $50 million project that would expand the museum's space by taking over a handful of state archives offices in the building that had been empty for five years. After the operations in those offices moved to Rome, the government approved it, but then insisted on hiring their own contractors for the renovation. Those contractors were not familiar with working on historic buildings and caused damage by injecting cement into the foundation that resulted in cracking. This project stalled after that.

[Holly Frey]

We are going to talk about how the Uffizi recovered from the blast and how that recovery has stretched into the very recent past after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going Wouldn't it be great to never buy gas again? EVs are as easy to charge as your phone, and they are a perfect addition to your everyday life. Most people are only driving about 40 miles a day, and most EVs can handle 200 to 400 miles of range on a charge. And there are hundreds of EV models available today, so there's something perfect for every lifestyle and budget. I drive an ev. I've had it for a couple of years. It's my favorite car I've ever owned. It is so fun to drive. The pickup is incredible. It's super agile and it is easy to maintain. The way forward is electric. Learn [e-mail] brought to you by Apple

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

be a little weird. One minute you're in a meeting that could have been an email. The next you're trying to decode corporate jargon that somehow means nothing. And don't even get me started on the quick sync that turns into a 45 minute deep dive. I know I have had a these and many more frustrations. The truth is, figuring out your career isn't always straightforward. Whether you're trying to grow pivot or just stay relevant, it can feel like you're navigating it all on your own. That's where LinkedIn comes in. LinkedIn can help you grow your career, helping you confidently navigate your path with insights, ideas and inspiration from your professional community. You can stay up to date with the latest trends in your field, connect with people who get it, and discover opportunities tailored to your goals, your experience, and what actually matters to you. Whether you're looking for something new or just trying to grow where you are, LinkedIn gives you the tools and connections to move forward with confidence because LinkedIn is the network that works for you. Visit LinkedIn.com class to learn more.

[Holly Frey]

Unlike the people we normally talk about on the show, we are living in a time when Internet connectivity is a standard part of life for most people and there is literally no way we could research and prepare our podcast without the Internet. If connectivity goes down for me, it can be really hard to make up that lost time. And for businesses, Internet connectivity is even more of a necessity. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast and reliable Internet, advanced Wi Fi, phone, TV and mobile services. Spectrum business offers 100% US based customer support and they do it 24 7. That means you can always stay up and running no matter what hours your business keeps. Spectrum Business also will tailor connectivity solutions just for you. They will put a package together that is built for your business budget. Millions of business owners rely on Spectrum Business to keep them connected, so visit spectrum.combusiness to learn more. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Uffizi was incredibly quick to form a plan of action for recovery. Curators and other museum staff started cleanup the same day as the blast, mobilizing quickly to protect the art and to assess the damage. In cases where canvases and sculptures had been shredded by glass and other debris, staff members carefully crawled the floors of the galleries to collect every possible piece. They matched them to their frames and what was left of the original art, and then they stored them all together for possible reconstruction. This meant that they were literally pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a painting versus a sculpture versus possibly a piece of the building. And there was broken glass everywhere, so this was an act of dedication. As they worked, they sorted those collected pieces into wooden trays to try to keep the various works of art separated.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

It is really hard to imagine how much determination and teamwork it took to clean up the museum and reopen it, but the Uffizi was incredibly organized in this effort and Other museums in the city also helped. While the Uffizi was closed, some of the other museums extended their hours so that tourists would still have access to the city's art. Twenty days after the bombing, less than three weeks, the museum was partially reopened. A lot of the paintings from the damaged part of the building were rotated into the reopened galleries so that people could still see them, and then the remaining galleries were restored and reopened over the course of the next four years. Because of the need for the museum to rebuild, the logistical problems of space it had faced before the tragedy were able to be addressed in the aftermath of the bombing. The response to the tragedy was so impressive that it became a model for how museum recovery should be managed.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, I feel like that could be its own whole topic. There have been papers written about how they handled it and how every other museum should study how they handled it, because their bias for action was so great, while also maintaining an incredibly high level of care. It's quite cool. In the years immediately following the attack, Manfredi's painting the Concert was restored as much as possible. It had been shredded into fragments, but the recovered fragments were big enough that restorers were able to piece what they had together, although it is not a complete picture. Then, in 2003, Gherardo Dellanotti's Adoration of the Shepherds was also restored, but the Card Players remained as the one piece that was believed to be beyond repair. It was so damaged that it actually remained untouched for decades. In the days and weeks following the explosion, the museum staff had carefully taken what was left of it, which was just hundreds of tiny, fragmented pieces, and covered it with rice paper to protect it. Those pieces were placed in an envelope that was stored along with the original canvas and frame of the work. That particular painting had not actually been in the Uffizi for terribly long when the bombing happened. It had been in Palazzo Pitti, in a storeroom, until 1969, when it went through a restoration, and then it was added to the Caravagesque collection on display at the Uffizi.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Fast forward to 2014, when Daniela Lippi happened across the fragments of the Card Players. She had studied painting restoration starting all the way back when she was 19, and from there she had started working with Soprentenzenza, that means Superintendency, which is an office within Italy's Ministry of Culture that focuses on conservation and protection of important works. She described the moment when she saw the Card Players this way in 2023 in an interview quote, I was at the gallery's storage rooms for an inspection. When I came across the work and what was left of it, the work bailed on. The frame had been placed in the entrance hall, and on the table lay the envelope containing all the painting's fragments collected from the floor. Among them, the fragment with the playing cards stood out. Somehow. The identifying element of the represented subject had survived. But the fragments of painted canvas would become dust if left in that envelope. I thought that through my work, I could contribute in a small way to saving a record of that dramatic event.

[Holly Frey]

Lippi put together a detailed proposal describing her plan to at least partially restore the badly damaged painting. And she got approval. But then the next hurdle was money. In June 2017, the Uffizi, along with partners from the Florence community, launched a fundraiser for the project, which was called Culture Against Terror. Through crowdfunding, more than €26,000 were raised. So at that point, the financials were in place and then began the actual work.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So keep in mind, the 615 pieces that Leapi and her team had to work with were tiny, some of them just a centimeter or two in width and height. So she was tasked with a very precious jigsaw puzzle, where all of the pieces were so damaged and you could not try to match them edge to edge to find their locations. She needed a good visual reference to try to match the colors and the shadings of the fragments. The Uffizi archive had photographs of it that had been taken after the 1969-1970 restoration, but those were in black and white. But then Liebe started searching the Scala archives. This is a Florentine archive dating back to 1953 that collects images of cultural history, including art, and then creates very high quality digital versions that can be licensed. So sort of like Getty Images, but for art and film. And they had a high resolution photograph of the card players from 1988. So five years before the attack, and well after the prior restoration, Scala donated this image to the project.

[Holly Frey]

And the resulting project is this really cool marriage of technology and art, because each tiny piece was scanned, and then the image of the original painting was projected onto the canvas to enable the restorers to visualize placement and kind of match up pieces to their positions. Keep in mind, this painting was in the style of Caravaggio, which meant that a lot of these recovered pieces were just incredibly dark shades of brown and plums verging on black. So discerning which tiny fragment was going to fit where required incredible concentration and care.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

As Lippi and her fellow restoration experts started carefully comparing what they had in hand to that high resolution photo. So they realized that not all of the pieces were going to be usable. Even with all 615 pieces, this would have been a partial restoration. But some of those fragments were so small or so damaged that they could not be reincorporated into the piece. In the end, almost 200 pieces were deemed unusable. Each of the usable fragments had to be very carefully cleaned. They were painstakingly stitched together and affixed to a new backing canvas with with special adhesive. The ones that could not be used were affixed to panels that are placed in a custom folder on the back of the painting so they will be available for future analysis. In the end, right around 30% of the original painting has been pieced back together. It's both beautiful and heartbreaking to see the vast blank areas in this frame. In a 2023 interview with Scala Archives, Leapfrog stated, quote, the work thus recovered is not brought back to an intact state, but has become a document, a memory, and warning of that terrible affront. If you are watching this on our Netflix channel and you're wondering why are you not showing us what this looks like? It is that artwork that is part of Italy's cultural heritage has special protections through the Italian government. So you can use pictures of these works for like personal use, but not for something like what we are doing where we are putting a show on Netflix. But you can see them on the Uffizi's website.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, if you do an Internet search for Uffizi Manfredi, it's gonna come up like I did that right before we recorded. And three of the top five results were images of this restored painting. It's a very famous effort. When the partially restored painting was set to make its debut in 2018, the Uffizi's director, Eike Schmidt told told the New York Times that this whole project was really about much more than art. Quote. For Florence, Italy and the world, it was such an important event of terror. We can't bring back to life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings, but we can build a memorial for culture against violence and terror. In addition to the Manfredi painting when this debut happened, the museum also showed a documentary in the gallery that showed the work that Lippi's team had done, and it also included interviews with rescue workers who had been on the scene following the blast in 1993.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Since then, the partially restored the card players as well as the concert have been displayed on subsequent years as temporary exhibits marking the anniversary of the bombing?

[Holly Frey]

Yeah. I'm not clear whether they do it every year. One thing that I read while I was in Florence made it sound like this is an annual thing they do now. But I couldn't find any clear evidence where they were, like now in, you know, 2020. And I don't know what happened during, like, the really harsh period of the pandemic, whether they had just shut down and weren't doing it or not. So probably they're, you know, I'm sure they will show it again and again. It's so cool. I have a listener mail that's also kind of about art. Yeah, it's about greeting cards.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh, good.

[Holly Frey]

Which I was delighted that people enjoyed our weird greeting card episode because that's one of those ones that I was like, I'm into this. I don't know if anybody else is, but this is an email from our listener Kelsey, who writes, hello, ladies. I've been listening to the show for many years through many hosts. I started when I got my first ipod, Nano, when I was in College around 2008. I love your banter and hearing about your crafty pursuits. The recent podcast about greeting cards was particularly interesting. Over last summer, I got into watercolor painting through a project where I illustrated a short story I wrote. I'm working on self publishing it on Amazon. Since then, I've been painting cards. They're a great small unit of art. As a teacher, I'm tired after work. Thank you for being an educator. And then Kelsey mentions the plan to get back into crochet when there's more time available over the summer and concludes, thank you for your hard work. I love this email One, because I always wanna thank all of our teachers because they deserve it. And especially in this episode where we talked about museum staff needing to buy supplies. I'm like, just like teachers was how I felt when I was doing the research. But also I also have gotten into watercolor painting recently. In the last year, when I was in Japan last year, my best friend is an artist. She's also who I went to Italy with. And there was this one art supply store in Japan she wanted to go to. And we went and I, on a whim, bought art supplies. I bought watercolor sets. I had not watercolor painted since I was a kid. And that wasn't real watercolor, that's just goofing off. But these sets were so beautiful that I was entranced and I was like, must buy. And then earlier this year, I was like, I'm going to start using these A little bit. And so I've been doing my own little self directed watercolor study for the same reasons that Kelsey mentions. You can spend 15, 20 minutes and produce something kind of cute. And also I've been using it in fabric design.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh, nice.

[Holly Frey]

Where I'll do a watercolor and then scan it in and incorporate it into a fabric print. So I love. I want everybody to make art in whatever way makes sense to them because I honestly think it is some of the best therapy you can do outside of actually having a therapist. I just think it's good for your soul to make things. It makes your brain work in a new way that we're not given the opportunity to do all the time, where you're just kind of playing low stakes. Art is the best for your mind, in my opinion. Anyway, that's just me proselytizing that. I want everybody to please make art in whatever way they like because I think it's really good for your soul. Kelsey, thank you so much for this email because you made me delighted and gave me an excuse to talk about the importance of art. There are also photographs of some of the art that Kelsey's done. One says, be a good plant, water yourself. And I just think that's charming as heck. And is a painting of a sunflower, which I also love. And then there is another that has some beautiful colored dragonflies in it and another that I am not 100% confident. I believe it is a lion and that its mane is the rainbow.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, I think it's a lion with a rainbow.

[Holly Frey]

Main and not my first thought was, is this a kitty that is just surrounded by a halo? Like a kitty kitty, not like a lion. Although lions are kitties. Anyway, these are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing your art with us. I. I love art. There's no surprise there. But I'm always delighted when people share their work with us. So that's another thing. If you don't want to do pet tacks, you can share your art. It's great. You can send us whatever you want. If you want to do that. You can do that at History podcast [e-mail] if you would like to check out our source lists and our show notes, which we've mentioned a couple times in this episode. You can do [e-mail] if you would like to subscribe to the podcast and you haven't done that yet. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Holly Frey]

Wouldn't it be great to never buy gas again? EVs are as easy to charge as your phone, and they are a perfect addition to your everyday life. Most people are only driving about 40 miles a day, and most EVs can handle 200 to 400 miles of range on a charge. And there are hundreds of EV models available today, so there's something perfect for every lifestyle and budget. I drive an ev. I've had it for a couple of years. It's my favorite car I've ever owned. It is so fun to drive. The pickup is incredible. It's super agile and it is easy to maintain. The way forward is electric. Learn [e-mail] brought to you by Apple

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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