On December 1, a night train brought them across France and through the Alps, and they woke to find themselves in Italy. When Bill and Jimmy emerged from Santa Maria Novella station in Florence, they discovered the center of the Renaissance city largely in ruins. Three years previously, on the night of August 3, 1944, hoping to slow the advance of American and British armies, the Germans blew up five of the city’s six bridges, sparing only the Ponte Vecchio. They compensated for that omission by dynamiting all the streets leading up to the bridge on either side of the river. In 1947, most of this damage had yet to be repaired, although temporary Bailey bridges had been erected in place of the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Ponte alla Carraia.
Despite the ruinous state of the city, and the exhaustion of the people after war and hardship, preceded by years of Fascist rule, there was a mood of optimism in the air. “Early post-war Italy was glorious,” wrote the novelist Sybille Bedford. “One embraced the people for whom the springs of life were flowing again; they were at one with the staggering beauty of what there was to see, everywhere, dawdling in the sun, the sweet air, the new near quiet. Petrol was scarce, the Vespas and rattling trams were joyful toys, their noise another attribute of being alive.”
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