“Are you kidding? With all the oddball characters they had over there at the Fenice, they didn’t have to pick on these two guys. There was actually one guy working there—listen to this—who used to say, ‘Fire! Fire!’ every time he walked by. No joke! And I heard about another guy who, wherever he worked, a fire would break out. They ruled that guy out almost immediately.
“No, the only evidence Casson has is who ‘officially’ left the theater last. And ‘officially’ it was Carella and Marchetti. Now, what kind of evidence is that? What does it prove? Anybody could have walked into that theater! Anybody! No one was checking. Doors were unlocked, some doors were even left open! Nobody was standing guard. The custodian wandered off and didn’t even show up at the fire until twenty minutes later. But who needed an arsonist anyway? The place wasn’t a theater. It was a cowshed, ready to go up in flames any minute.”
DESPITE CASSON’S CONFIDENCE IN HIS CASE against Carella and Marchetti, the public remained dubious, at least as far as I could tell from casual conversations and overheard remarks.
A vendor at the Rialto food market said to a housewife buying tomatoes, “Who but a fool would believe two Venetians burned the Fenice? Venetians, no less!”
The housewife nodded. “It’s crazy.”
“And for so little money!” said the vendor. “But even if it was for a fortune. No. To burn down the Fenice? It’s unthinkable.”
The Venetian penchant for conspiracy theories was not satisfied by the notion that two young men had torched the Fenice to avoid a small penalty. There had to be something much bigger, and more secretive, behind it. The Mafia was still a prime suspect for many people, if they believed it was arson at all.
One person who did not believe it was arson was the man whose photographs had, ironically, been used by the experts to prove that it had been. The photographer, Graziano Arici, had been walking through Campo San Fantin on his way to dinner the night of the fire when he smelled smoke, saw flames, and ran home to get his camera. His pictures were studied not only by Casson’s experts but by the prosecutor in Bari who had compared them with pictures of the fire that had been set by arsonists at the Petruzzelli Opera House and found an eerie similarity.
“It was only because I had broken up with my girlfriend a few hours earlier that I happened to see the fire,” Arici told me. “I walked her to the vaporetto, and instead of going with her to Mestre, I came back home and was on my way to having dinner alone.”
Arici invited me to look at his photographs at his studio on the ground floor of Count Girolamo Marcello’s palace, barely one hundred yards from the Fenice. An engaging, gray-bearded man, Arici sat at a computer nimbly manipulating a keyboard and mouse, arranging and rearranging his images of the fire on his monitor, zooming in and out. The photographs showed the fire spreading rapidly from left to right.
“They claim these pictures prove arson,” Arici said, “because there was a fire wall dividing that floor in two, and it didn’t seem to slow down the ‘flashover.’ So one of the experts figured that the fire must have been set in at least two places—possibly even three places—and of course that would have meant arson. But I think that’s nonsense. What if the fire doors had been left open? What about the stacks of wood and the heaps of sawdust and wood chips? They could easily have caught fire in an accident.”
“So what do you think happened?” I asked.
“Well, maybe the electricians wanted to dry something and used a heater or a blowtorch. They had an accident. Maybe they tried to put the fire out and couldn’t, and then they got scared and ran. That would explain why they tried to make people believe they had left the theater an hour earlier than they did. Casson probably accused them of arson hoping they would tell him about the accident if there was one, and get a lighter sentence—for negligence, fleeing the fire and not reporting it. But who knows? I’m only a photographer.”
LUDOVICO DE LUIGI WAS ONLY AN ARTIST, but he had it all figured out. “It always comes down to money in the end,” he said, “and the end is nowhere in sight. A lot more money has to pass through many more hands before this will be over.”
I mentioned that I had been impressed by the apparent thoroughness of the scientific tests made by Casson’s experts. De Luigi’s response, after having a good laugh, was to insist that I meet a friend of his. “I’ll show you a real expert,” he said. “Come with me.”
At the rowing club on the Zattere, De Luigi introduced me to a man who was standing next to a gondola tied up at the landing dock. The man had a thick black beard without a mustache, like Abraham Lincoln’s. His name was Gianpietro Zucchetta, and he was a chemist who worked for the Ministry of the Environment. His gondola was an exact replica of Casanova’s gondola, circa 1750.
“It looks like the gondolas you see in paintings by Canaletto,” said Zucchetta, “which are noticeably different from modern gondolas.”
Zucchetta’s gondola had a removable cabin, or felze, attached to its midsection, and its front-to-back line was straight instead of curved at the bow, which made it necessary for two gondoliers to row it instead of one. Most tellingly, the prow rose higher out of the water, and Zucchetta said that the first time he took it out at high tide, he was surprised to find it would not fit under a number of bridges that Casanova had passed under with ease. “It was a dramatic demonstration how much the water level has risen in Venice over the past two hundred and fifty years,” he said.
Zucchetta knew more about water and Venice than most people did; he had written a history of acqua alta in Venice. He was also an authority on Venetian bridges, having cataloged all 443 in his book Venice, Bridge by Bridge. In the course of conversation, I learned also that Zucchetta had written several other books: two about the canals of Venice, one about the “lost canals” that have been filled in (the rii terrà), one about Casanova, one about Casanova’s gondola, one about the history of gas in Venice, and yet another about the Venetian sewer system. “When you pay a gondolier to row you on the canals,” said Zucchetta, “he’s rowing you through the sludge of Venice.”
But none of these specialties was the reason De Luigi had brought me to see Zucchetta, as I discovered when I asked, “What will your next book be about?”
“A history of fires in Venice,” he said.
De Luigi beamed. “My friend Zucchetta is an expert on fires. He’s investigated—what?—six hundred, seven hundred fires?”
“Eight hundred,” said Zucchetta, “including the fire at the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari. I’m a member of the International Association of Arson Investigators.”
“Have you been called on to consult on the Fenice fire?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but I’ve refused.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a political fire, and I don’t investigate political fires.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Politicians are involved. They are among the people being charged with negligence. Now, there are two conflicting charges: negligence and arson. Naturally the negligence suspects all want the verdict to be arson, and the arson suspects want it to be negligence. Each side will try to find experts to prove their point. Two of the negligence suspects have offered to give me a blank check if I would testify as an expert for them. They told me I could fill in the figures. Obviously they wanted me to say it was arson, even if I didn’t think so. That’s why it’s a political fire, and that’s why I refused.”
“Who were they?”
“That I won’t say. But the defendants are not the only people who have a stake in the outcome of this case. A lot of people lost property. The apartments of some of the neighbors were damaged, other people had equipment or personal belongings that were destroyed in the fire, and they all want to recover losses not covered by insurance. If the verdict is arson, none of them will collect anything by suing the electricians, because they have no money. However, if it’s found to be negligence, then these people have a choice of rich targets to sue: the
city of Venice, the Fenice Foundation, and the fifteen individuals charged with negligence. Two of the defendants for negligence have already put their property in their wives’ names.”
Signor Zucchetta’s rowing partner arrived. They prepared to board the gondola.
“I assume you’ve been following developments in the case,” I said.
“Yes, I have,” Zucchetta replied, stepping into the gondola and steadying it as his rowing partner climbed in.
“Do you have an opinion about how it happened?”
“Certainly,” he said. Zucchetta untied the mooring line and pushed away from the dock.
“Do you think the electricians did it?”
Zucchetta shook his head. “If the electricians burned down the Fenice,” he said with a smile, “then plumbers are responsible for acqua alta.”
{11}
OPERA BUFFA
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE ARRESTS OF THE TWO ELECTRICIANS, I was riding in a vaporetto headed for St. Mark’s when a water taxi fell in behind us. Five men in business suits were standing on the taxi’s foredeck behind the pilot, and even from a distance of fifty feet, I could tell there was something important about this group. A robust, elegant, white-haired man in sunglasses was clearly the leader of whatever pack this was. He had strong features, a florid complexion, and a regal bearing. I assumed the other men were business associates or even bodyguards. Then the head man removed his jacket, and I could see he was wearing his wristwatch over his shirt cuff. I knew immediately who he was. Nobody did that but Gianni Agnelli.
Agnelli, the chairman of the automotive giant Fiat, could have been in Venice for any number of reasons. In the 1980s, he and Fiat had bought the neoclassical Palazzo Grassi, restored it, and converted it into a magnificent exhibition space for major art shows. One of Agnelli’s sisters, Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, lived directly across the Grand Canal from Palazzo Grassi in Palazzo Brandolini. Another sister, Susanna Agnelli, owned a vacation apartment in San Vio. It was likely, however, that Gianni Agnelli’s reason for being in Venice had something to do with the rebuilding of the Fenice.
Reconstruction of the opera house had been thrown open to competitive bidding, and six consortiums had submitted plans. Fiat had entered a bid through Impregilo, a group of construction companies headed by Fiat Engineering. The announcement of the winner was expected soon. Impregilo was the odds-on favorite, thanks largely to Agnelli’s magisterial presence and to the fact that Impregilo had successfully renovated Palazzo Grassi, making it the only company in the Fenice competition that had already experienced the logistical nightmare Venice imposed on construction projects. The difficulties were unique to Venice, and prodigious. Giant cranes essential for construction would have to be disassembled and floated to the Fenice through a narrow, heavily traveled canal on barges that would be unable to pass under the canal’s two bridges during especially high tides. Bricks, structural steel, wood planks, metal pipes, blocks of marble, and other building materials would all be brought to the Fenice by the same route, but since there would be no room to store these things at the Fenice, off-site containment areas would have to be created in the nearest open spaces—in Campo Sant’ Angelo, for example, or even on platforms erected on the Grand Canal.
Agnelli, who was known affectionately to the public and the press as “L’Avvocato” (the Lawyer), had assembled the same team that had worked so well on Palazzo Grassi ten years earlier. That included the architects Gae Aulenti in Milan and Antonio Foscari in Venice.
Gae Aulenti would be the senior architect on this project. She was best known for her transformation of the nineteenth-century Parisian railroad station Gare D’Orsay into the Musée D’Orsay, and for designing the modern-art gallery at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Antonio (Tonci) Foscari and his architect wife, Barbara del Vicario, lived in Palazzo Barbaro in an apartment directly beneath the Curtis family’s ornate salone. Tonci Foscari, a professor of architectural history at the University of Venice for the past twenty-five years, was the current president of the Accademia di Belle Arti. At present, the Foscaris were working together on the restoration of the seventeenth-century Malibran Theater near the Rialto. That project had suddenly taken on a new urgency, because the loss of the Fenice had left Venice without a major theater for live performances.
Of all Tonci Foscari’s architectural projects, the one best known to the public was his and Barbara’s restoration of their country house along the Brenta Canal: the Villa Foscari, also known as La Malcontenta. Andrea Palladio had designed the villa in the sixteenth century for two Foscari brothers, and it was a model of perfect simplicity and harmony. House & Garden had featured it in an article entitled “The Most Beautiful House in the World.”
On the night the Fenice burned, the Foscaris were at home when a friend called to tell them a fire had broken out near them. They had rushed to the roof of the music conservatory next door, the tallest building in the area. Tonci Foscari had stood with his camera in hand, horrified, feeling as if he were watching a murder, unable to bring himself to take a photograph. Now he was part of a team hoping to rebuild the Fenice.
We sat in the living room of the Foscaris’ apartment in Palazzo Barbaro. The white walls were decorated with a chaste eighteenth-century pastel stucco trim, a minimalist treatment compared to the riot of baroque embellishment in the Curtises’ old salone one floor above. Large windows looked out onto the Grand Canal. Portraits of Foscari’s ancestors—a Venetian admiral and a pope—stared down at us from the walls. The portrait of the fifteenth-century Doge Francesco Foscari, who was immortalized in the Byron play and the Verdi opera The Two Foscari, was hanging in the Correr Museum in St. Mark’s Square.
“A French group asked me to participate in a bid to rebuild the Fenice,” said Foscari, “and then a Spanish group. But I hesitated. Finally L’Avvocato Agnelli began reassembling the Palazzo Grassi team. It was almost inevitable that he would. Having restored Palazzo Grassi, he could not not compete for the contract to rebuild the Fenice. And, being Agnelli, he could not fail to win. And if he won, he would be able to guarantee absolutely, as no one else could, that the job would be completed on schedule and at the cost he promised. He called me and said, ‘You are with us!’ And at that point, I had to become very pragmatic. It seemed like a secure situation, more so than the others, so I accepted.”
Foscari was under no illusion that his architectural contribution could be much more than seeing to the details in making a new version of the original theater. His real value to Impregilo would be his familiarity with Venice’s complicated building procedures and his experience in dealing with the local bureaucracy.
“Theoretically,” he said, “all the designs submitted should be essentially the same. It’s really just a competition between construction companies, or at least it should be. But—and this is very Italian—it has become a competition among architects with endless debates about their relative gifts.”
“Has Agnelli made an offer Venice won’t be able to refuse?” I asked.
“It will be a good deal for Venice, if Venice chooses it,” he said. “L’Avvocato certainly won’t make any money from it. In fact, he could well lose money. But he’d be doing it as a matter of pride and prestige, not for the profit. Furthermore, when you build in Venice, any anticipated profits could disappear, because the most unexpected events can cause very expensive delays.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, for example, when you’re digging a foundation, you might uncover an architectural relic of historic value. That happened just recently at our restoration of the Malibran Theater.” Foscari’s eyes brightened. This was apparently a delay he relished.
“Do you know what lies beneath the Malibran? Marco Polo’s house! It was built in the thirteenth century. We knew this before we started, of course, and when we dug down, we found it exactly where the documents said it would be. We came to the ground floor of the house two meters below the level of the ground today. That w
as exciting, but there was more to come, because we kept digging. Soon we came to an eleventh-century floor, and below that an eighth-century floor, and farther down, finally, a sixth-century floor! This floor was laid at the time of the invasion of the Lombards, and it represents the original foundations of Venice itself. We have very little knowledge of that period in Venetian history. The written record goes back only as far as the eighth century.