I was a bookish and kind of nerdy 15-year-old in suburban Pennsylvania when a cataclysmic flood made a muddy mess of Florence in 1966. The stories and photos in the National Geographic and Life magazines that arrived in my parents’ mailbox transported me there in my adolescent imagination.

When I viewed a black-and-white documentary on PBS, directed by Franco Zeffirelli and narrated by Richard Burton, it sealed the deal. The dramatic efforts of the “mud angels” and the restorers who peeled frescoes off moldy church walls and fished polychrome sculptures out of dark and oily waters in Florence’s flooded streets moved me. Theirs, I concluded, was the coolest job in the world, and that is what I would one day become.