Art: The Venus Fixers

In Florence, U.S. Army officers were hard at work rebuilding a part of the Nazi-destroyed, rubble-rimmed banks of the Ponte Vecchio. Four of Florence's famed medieval towers had been badly damaged; three were already repaired. Fixing the wobbly fourth, 100-year-old Torre degli Amidei, was the immediate problem.

Rebuilding Italian towers is only a trifling part of the mammoth job now being done by 16 Allied officers (eight Britons, eight Americans), whose jawbreaking official title is the Allied Sub-commission for Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives in Italy. The title has been briefly...

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