On November 3, 1966, the mayor of Florence stood in the Palazzo Vecchio and joked to an American Chamber of Commerce banquet, "If it keeps raining like this, tomorrow morning the Arno will beat your Mississippi." By 5:00 a.m. the next day, the river had burst its banks and water was pouring into the city at a rate of 225,000 gallons per second, leaving some 14,000 works of art damaged or destroyed. Robert Clark's Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces (Doubleday) revisits that fateful day, interweaving its chaotic aftermath — a Velázquez self-portrait caked in mud, Galileo's telescope taken to a rooftop for protection, Cimabue's Crocifisso drowning in a "shallow lagoon" — with his own search for beauty. "The Arno had become a lash flagellating the church and the city; the ribbon of heating oil now running through and over it was a black serpent that licked the altars of Florence," writes Clark, who also borrows the voices of those who were present to create this vivid canvas of a city submerged.

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