Wading in tall boots and long gloves through streets filled with mud and oil, removing mud from millions of books using a newly invented resin and delivering food by basket to those trapped in their houses was the work of a group who became known as the Mud Angels.

The gli angeli del fango, or "angels of the mud," cleaned up Florence after the Arno River flooded in November 1966 to save the city's history and its people.

Hear from one of the Mud Angels, Carolyn Demcy, on the rescue of San Croce church.

Carolyn Demcy of Brooklyn, who has lived in Florence since August 1968, was one of these angels.

"I wanted to come immediately, but I couldn't," Demcy said. "I couldn't leave school so I was what was called an 'angelito del fango;' I was a little angel of the mud because I came in January."

Demcy, a linguistics lecturer at the University of Florence, first heard of the flood on the radio and, with little world knowledge, took the first step to help by going to a travel agency for information.

"I think I was 23, 24 and I wanted to save . . . the city," Demcy said. "I wasn't even thinking about the people, honestly. I wasn't even thinking about the city. It was the universal artistic patrimony that needed to be saved. I didn't know how or what I could do, but I knew I felt I had to do something."

When Demcy arrived in January 1967, she was sent to the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, the National Library, and then to the monastery Certosa to clean books alongside other mud angels from different nations.

"There were young people from every nation, almost," Demcy said. "The person on my right was Russian, the person on my left was French."

Paolo Coccheri, a Florentine who spent three nights in Fiesole because of the flood, said that because of Florence's importance to the world, the flood inspired more cooperation.

"A lot of angels of the mud came from all over the world not for Florentines, but for Florence," Coccheri said. "Florence belongs to the world, not only Italy, because art doesn't know boundaries. They actually saw [that] a rich heritage was going to be destroyed if they couldn't come here and help Florence."

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