The photos tell the story:

http://corrierefiorentino.corriere.i...608944.shtml#2

Article:

http://corrierefiorentino.corriere.i...09973729.shtml

Amazing - thanks GAC!

I'm surprised no-one has commented on the massive flooding in England and Wales and the moment - resulting in a minimum of four dead - one an old lady who drowned in her own home.

"no-one has commented on the massive flooding"

Because it really hasn't been massive.

It's been raining colossally. At its peak, there were hundreds of flood warnings out, and probably thousands of tiny localised floods (on a routine ten mile trip a few days back, about a dozen times the road crossed a previously unknown ford, now deep enough to have stalled a car we had ten years ago). We've been bailing out our utility room for the past week, and the pooch's walks are restricted to a handful of paths high enough to drain away, or tediously paved.

So for millions of us it's all been a bloody nuisance. But we've not had towns stranded the way they were in 2008. Flood defences have improved massively (though you have to analyse what the media's whingeing about to dig that fact out), and the news has been full of "In York, flooding was widely feared, but the town's defences worked this time" stories - always accompanied, of course by pics of the parts that have flooded more or less every year since Constantine's mum was streetwalking there.

Since most of England's comfortably above sea level, the floods, by and large, are receding astonishingly fast - though my shock at how fast our river fell yesterday was tempered by going home to see TV pictures of the chaos twenty miles downstream as our "receded" waters were turning into temporary inundation in parts of Oxford. Even there, though: the story was of river defences that held.

Blame the "massive floods" myth on technology, better government and anti-government scepticism . The web means flood warnings are publicised, refined down almost to nano-locations and almost obsessively interrogated by everyone wanting to decide how to travel or which bits of the garden to sandbag. Everyone films their flood on the phone and uploads the result - unlike the massive floods of just five years ago, never mind those in the 1950s that killed hundreds. And The Government, by definition, is Never Doing Enough About Climate Change. So any columnist short of something to bitch about can blame Cameron personally for her local footpath being under six inches of water for a whole day (being a columnist, of course, totally ignorant of the fact that that footpath's been called Muddy Lane for centuries because it's flooded twice a year since the creation)

As for the four dead: how many people avoided dying in traffic accidents because it was too wet to drive fast, or too horrible to go out at all?

It was barely over a month ago that we were in Florence and one of the photos seems to have been taken very near our hotel. What a difference a short time can make! We were so lucky.