A Return to Life for Uffizi Gallery : Art: A ‘miracle’ project gets 60% of museum space back on show just 24 days after a bomb attack.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, home to one of the world’s favorite art collections, returned to life Sunday and opened its doors free of charge in celebration of a remarkable recovery.

Tens of thousands of art lovers--some from the United States and Japan--waited for hours under the broiling sun Sunday morning to visit the museum, which was seriously damaged by a bomb explosion 24 days ago that killed five people.

Three feverish weeks of clearing up the bomb-damaged 16th-Century gallery--first built as offices for the powerful Medici family, Florence’s Renaissance rulers, then home to a priceless collection of Renaissance and 17th-Century Italian art--left most undamaged works accessible to the public.

“I will give you no names of who was responsible for this miracle because we all worked as one person, right from the beginning,” gallery director Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani said Saturday.

Rooms off two of the three corridors, the east and south of the U-shaped gallery, on the third floor of the building are open. The rooms of the west corridor suffered a nearly direct hit from a blast of some 400 pounds of explosives stuffed in a car parked in the street on the night of May 27, as did a 16th-Century academy where some paintings were stored, on the floor below. The closed rooms off the west corridor are mostly windowless with gashes in their walls and gaping holes in their roofs where skylights were blown out. Paintings were thrown from the wall by the blast, torn by shattered glass and flying debris, and 37 of them are under intensive care in restoration laboratories. Five 17th-Century paintings and two English prints were destroyed.

“But from today I want to look on the bright side,” Petrioli Tofani said as she gave a press preview of the gallery Saturday. Sixty percent of the space was back on show, she added. Visible works include 13th-Century paintings by Giotto, Cimabue, Botticelli’s “Rites of Spring” and “Birth of Venus,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi” and “Annunciation,” works by Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Mantegna.

The closed rooms housed later works by Rubens, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian among other illustrious names. Many were saved by recently installed bulletproof glass covers. One victim, the “Death of Adonis” by Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo, was first given up as irreparably damaged, virtually ripped apart by the explosion and bereft of much of its pigment, but it was returned to the same Florentine laboratory that had recently restored it and “the prognosis is positive--the patient will recover,” says Petrioli Tofani.

“Many of the restorers we called on had just finished work on some paintings--they were anguished to see the damage. Many of them had ‘children’ among the wreckage, pictures they had just painstakingly restored,” she recalled.

One key reconstruction job that made Sunday’s opening possible was the restoration of the damaged exit stairway, first built by 16th-Century architect Bernardo Buontalenti. Its windows and steps were damaged by the blast, the rush of air carrying one window into the east corridor to decapitate a Roman statue of a discus thrower. A tiny sample of the undamaged west wing collection is on show on the ground floor: three paintings by Michelangelo, Titian and Caravaggio are symbolic witnesses to what the explosion failed to desecrate--all covered with a newly developed anti-reflection and bulletproof glass.

A restored but forever damaged 17th-Century still-life by the Medici’s favorite still-life artist, Bartolomeo Bimbi, looks like an unfinished jigsaw. Large missing pieces of paint blotch an otherwise vibrant but dark-hued oil painting of a bowl of reddish flowers, a hare and a gun. Beside it photos show the original damage and the restoration--an empty frame and bits of canvas carefully pieced together.

Petrioli Tofani and staff were rewarded for keeping their initial vow to reopen the gallery three weeks after the disaster by an appreciative private visit Saturday by Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.

Sunday’s opening to the public began with Italian officials’ tribute to the Uffizi staff efforts. Arts minister Alberto Ronchey adapted Winston Churchill’s comment on the Battle of Britain in World War II, saying “never has so much been done by so few for so many.”

But the larger tribute came from a hot and exhausted public greeted by free multilingual guided tours. Appreciative, curious, awe-struck, most were aware of the historic occasion. “We put our departure off another day just to come here,” said a tired but excited engineering student, 21-year-old Elan Tsvi Yaniv from Virginia. “Is the Botticelli room OK?” he asked anxiously.