War destroys lives, cities, buildings, streets…this is known all too well. But what happens when war happens in the middle of one of the most culturally and artistically important cities in the World? The legacy of buildings, artifacts, paintings, sculptures, and documents on which our shared humanity is founded. Thankfully, during the Second World War, many illustrious men thought about this same artistic heritage, and its importance, and saved the most important masterpieces known to men (most of them found in our beautiful city of Florence) thus making it possible for us to still visit them in present time.

As the Allied forces hit Italy, first in Sicily, leaving the whole country, and its masterpieces, at risk, in 194  before the conflict in Italy hit a bigger scale, American scholars and curators proposed a military agency with the sole purpose of guarding and saving the most important artistic masterpieces in the area. The idea was approved by President Roosevelt, establishing the Monuments Officers or Venus Fixers.

Between the Fall of 1942 and the Summer of 1943, the Monuments Officers moved the contents of Florence’s Museums and Churches to different locations in the countryside, hiding them before conflict broke out in the city. No two works by famous artists were sent to the same location, but many of these pastoral safe havens would soon be cut off from communication with Florence, making it impossible for the art protectors to come back to the city to protect the artifacts and inmovable buildings left behind.

Michelangelo’s David, for example, was too large to remove from Florence’s Accademia, and had to be encased in a protective cocoon of bricks and logs. Florentines needed the help of the military to provide protection, which in the end facilitated the targeted bombing of Florence in March 1944; the greatest material losses were the destruction of the bridges, streets, medieval buildings, and towers around the Ponte Vecchio, which was the only thing spared.

Writer Giorgio Querci wrote of smoking rubble around the almost bridgeless Arno: “never before had the monuments felt so much like our own monuments, the most intimate and familiar aspects of our landscape, the face of our city, our childhood, our life, our very soul.” These heartbreaking words paint a grim picture of the destruction of Florence, but yet, in reality, not all was lost.

Thanks to the impassioned men who protected these masterpieces, among which; Lieutenant Fred Hartt, who, as one colleague said, “breathed and lived Tuscan art for the U.S. Army,” later wrote a memoir of his service and was made an honorary citizen of Florence.

The Monuments Officers affected the course of the war itself, by improving the morale of bedraggled Italians who rejoiced to see their patrimony spared. As Giambologna’s 16th-century equestrian statue of Grand Duke Cosimo I  made its way back from its hiding place to its home in  Piazza della Signoria in February 1945, cries were heard of “Bentornato, Cosimo” (Welcome back, Cosimo!). For Florentines whose world had been turned upside down and destroyed, life and art went together, the survival of one completely relevant for the other.

Long live the Florentine masterpieces, and the Monuments Officers.