The City of Falling Angels

  “Seeing those floors was an intensely emotional experience for me. It was dramatic evidence that the water level has been rising, and Venice sinking, for fifteen hundred years, and that the Venetians have been dealing with this problem the same way for all that time, by raising the level of the city. We’re still doing it today. You can see workmen all over the city tearing up the paving stones along the canals and relaying them seven centimeters higher. This will reduce the number of floods for thirty years or so, but we can’t keep doing that forever.

  “Excavating Marco Polo’s house and all those floors below it was considered a big ‘problem,’ because it caused a delay in restoring the Malibran. It took us five months. Five very interesting months. Meanwhile all the Venetians were saying, ‘Oh, but you’re five months late! It’s always like this, no one can ever get anything done on time in Venice.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s very rare that you have the opportunity to do excavations of this sort. It’s important.’ ”

  “What’s under the Fenice?” I asked.

  “I’ve found a map of the site, drawn before the Fenice was built, so we know where the previous structures were. Fortunately, there’s nothing as important as Marco Polo’s house.”

  ON THE NIGHT OF THE FENICE FIRE, while Tonci Foscari stood on the roof of the music conservatory, transfixed, unable to take a photograph, Francesco da Mosto, also an architect, mingled with his dinner guests on his altana on the other side of the theater, watching the blaze through the viewfinder of his whirring video camera.

  Francesco and Jane da Mosto had been giving their first dinner party as a married couple when their landlord called to ask if they were burning down his house. He had seen smoke rising over the house from across town. Francesco went up to the altana to investigate, and when he got there, it all became abundantly clear. The da Mostos’ rooftop afforded a close, unobstructed view of the fire, and as the evening wore on, friends and family members came over, among them Francesco’s father, Ranieri da Mosto. Count da Mosto was a member of the Venice city council, which had abruptly adjourned its evening session upon receiving news of the fire.

  Francesco had been working as an auditor for the Public Works Department, and in the days that followed the fire, he was pressed into service with a group seeking to reconstruct the dynamics of how the fire started and to assess the stability of the Fenice’s surviving outer walls.

  One afternoon the Milanese architect Aldo Rossi came to the Fenice to look at its remains. Rossi, who had designed the restoration of the Carlo Felice Opera House in Genoa, had recently joined Holzmann-Romagnoli, the German-Italian consortium preparing a bid for the reconstruction. As he was being escorted around the site, Rossi mentioned that he was looking for a Venice-based architect to work on the Fenice with his group. The head engineer suggested Francesco da Mosto.

  Meeting the next day, Rossi and da Mosto had coffee and discussed the Fenice. Rossi found da Mosto to be well informed and engaging. “I want you on the team!” Rossi said, adding that he preferred informal working relationships. “When you address me,” he told da Mosto, “use the tu form.”

  Informality suited Francesco da Mosto perfectly. At thirty-five, he had a shock of unruly, prematurely white hair and an inclination to wear comfortable, usually rumpled clothes—a sport shirt open at the collar, a loose-fitting jacket, and cargo pants with big pockets. He could often be seen riding in his outboard motorboat through the canals or out into the lagoon.

  The da Mosto family was one of the oldest in Venice, its ancestry traceable more than a thousand years. The contemporary da Mostos lived in Palazzo Muti-Baglioni, a huge Renaissance palace tucked into the narrow streets near the Rialto food markets. Francesco had an office in a studio on the mezzanine floor.

  “The doorbell is out of order,” he told me on the phone. “When you get to the front door, look up. You will see a string hanging down from a window above it. Pull the string. It will ring a bell in my office, and I will buzz you in. Then come up one flight.”

  Da Mosto greeted me at the landing of a red-carpeted stairway. As we turned to go into his office, he gestured toward a marble bust on a pedestal by the door. “Meet Alvise da Mosto,” he said, “my favorite ancestor. He discovered the Cape Verde Islands in 1456 at the age of twenty-nine.”

  Da Mosto’s studio was a dark, cavernous space with a high, beamed ceiling, shelves filled to overflowing with books, videotapes, and files. Computers, printers, and a drawing table were half buried amid piles of papers and journals. The walls were crowded with charts, photographs, masks, and souvenirs. It was clutter on a grand scale.

  Da Mosto scooped a stack of papers off a chair, clearing a place for me to sit. I found myself facing a densely drawn family tree hanging on the wall.

  “How many generations is that?” I asked.

  “You know, I’m not really sure,” he said, laughing. “I’d have to count. Anyway, I think it’s about twenty-seven.”

  “All nobility?” I asked.

  “Nobility, yes, but not all of them noble. One of my female ancestors, a courtesan, gave Lord Byron the clap! Another, Vido da Mosto, was caught printing counterfeit money. They considered gouging his eyes out and hanging him between the columns in San Marco, but instead they gave him the job of printing the official money of the Venetian Republic. The theory, I guess, was that if somebody had a particular talent, the republic should make use of it. There was a da Mosto whose wife ate so much he went broke. Another da Mosto went to prison for insulting Doge Andrea Gritti, and three or four others were excommunicated. We’ve had a doge’s wife, but never a doge, one da Mosto barely lost to a man who was beheaded after he became doge, so maybe it’s just as well he lost. Anyway, da Mostos have always preferred being the power behind the throne. It’s a safer place to be.”

  “And now,” I said, “a da Mosto is coming to the rescue of Teatro La Fenice.”

  “Everybody expects Agnelli to win,” he said, “but we’ll find out in a day or two.”

  Da Mosto pulled a thick file out from under a stack of papers and handed it to me. “These are the specifications the Comune gave us for the new Fenice. It’s the preliminary plan,” he said, “what you call ‘bid documents.’”

  I leafed through the pages. The Fenice was laid out in a mixed-media presentation: floor plans, drawings, sketches, photographs, paintings.

  “Fortunately,” said da Mosto, “someone discovered the architectural plans that were drawn up in 1836, after the first fire. They were found in an archive along with detailed written instructions by the Meduna brothers. So we have all the correct measurements for the auditorium, which means we can re-create the Fenice’s acoustics exactly. The Medunas even described how the pieces of wood should be cut. Sound waves travel along the grain of the wood, so if it is cut properly and positioned at the correct angle, the sound will be carried evenly from the stage to every point in the theater. The Medunas personally signed every piece of wood!” Da Mosto clearly took delight in this last detail.

  “It seems pretty clear what’s expected,” I said.

  “Yes, but not completely,” he said. “When I received these documents from the Comune last September, I sat down and studied them several times. And something didn’t seem right.”

  Da Mosto turned to the Comune’s floor plans. “Here, look at this area.” He pointed to the south wing, a complex of small buildings attached like barnacles to the south wall of the theater.

  “According to this drawing,” he said, “the old south wing has been enlarged so that it now incorporates a two-story building the Fenice doesn’t own. It’s this blank space right here. It covers three hundred square meters in all, but it’s never been part of the Fenice. Right now,” he said, pulling out an old map of the theater, “you can see there’s a magazzino on the ground floor. It contains a laundry used by the restaurant Antico Martini; on the floor above, there are a couple of privately owned apartments. It’s very strange. There’s no mention of this new space in the written
instructions we were given. If we were supposed to rebuild the theater exactly as it was—com’era—this space doesn’t belong in it.”

  “Then why is it on the drawing?”

  “That’s what I wondered. Signor Baldi, the owner of Antico Martini, says he needs the laundry for his table linens, and no alternative space is available, so he won’t sell his magazzino. I didn’t know what to do about it, so I asked some of the engineers and architects who worked on the preliminary plan for the prefect. When they realized what I was talking about, they turned white as a piece of paper. So I immediately called Aldo Rossi and told him to stop work, because there was some confusion about the south wing.

  “I was apparently not the only one who raised the question. One of the other competitors had already written a letter asking about it. So the prefect sent faxes to all the bidders, but the wording of his fax only made it more confusing. He told us we were to build ‘the entire south wing of the theater, from the ground to the roof.’ But what does ‘the entire south wing’ mean? Does it mean the footprint of the old south wing as it was before the fire, or the footprint of the old south wing plus the additional building? Now I was more confused than ever. So I went over to the office of the city council and talked with some of my friends there who had worked there for years. Those are the people who always know what’s going on. They told me no one had said anything about it to them, but, with a little smile, they said we should include the new space.

  “We had a big meeting in Milan, and I explained what was going on in Venice. We decided to take a bit of a risk and go ahead with Rossi’s plan for the enlarged south wing.

  “The Comune probably assumed everybody would design the south wing with more of the same kind of offices that were there before. But Rossi had another idea, and it was brilliant. He moved the rehearsal hall from the top floor down here to the ground floor in the new space. He made it big enough to hold rehearsals for a full orchestra and chorus. It could also be used for chamber music concerts or conferences. The beautiful thing is that this rehearsal room becomes a new medium-size theater that could be in use at the same time as the main theater. It’s isolated acoustically, and it has its own entrance on the street. With two theaters operating at once, the Fenice’s total capacity would be increased by about ten percent.”

  Da Mosto put the file back down on the sea of papers on his desk. “I’m curious to see what the others have done with the south wing.”

  On the way out, da Mosto took me one flight up to the piano nobile. The central hall was a vast space, seventy-five feet in length. It had tall leaded-glass windows at each end and stuccoed walls hung with portraits of da Mosto ancestors, one of whom had been a pay-master of the Venetian military and was surrounded by stacks of gold coins. Off the main hall, an elegant salon with walls of gold brocade led to a small, frescoed chapel and beyond it a dining room where, da Mosto said, a scene from Visconti’s Senso had been filmed.

  “The producers of the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley also want to shoot a scene in the house,” said da Mosto. “It’s very expensive to keep the stucchi repaired in these humid conditions, so we said yes.”

  As I was looking at the family portraits, da Mosto’s father came into the room. He was a courtly gentleman, soft-spoken and impeccably dressed in a suit and tie in muted colors. I had read that he was a leading proponent of the movement to restore the Republic of Venice as an independent state, separate from the rest of Italy. He was a separatist, an indipendista. I asked him about it.

  “Most people don’t realize,” he said, “that the Venetian Republic never really died. When Napoleon’s army was approaching in 1797, the Grand Council voted in a panic to dissolve the republic. But the vote was illegal, because there were not enough people in the council chamber to make a quorum. Napoleon’s savage and despicable occupation of Venice was only a military operation, and the Austrian occupation that followed was, again, nothing more than a military holding action. The unification of Italy in the referendum of 1866 was a sham, a trick by the Savoia family, with ballots that were filled in beforehand, and with the police and the carabinieri spying on people at the polling station. It was shameful.”

  “But what can possibly be done about it now?” I asked.

  “We hope to bring all of this to the attention of the Hague Tribunal. I don’t know what will happen. It won’t be an easy battle.”

  Somehow I doubted that any tribunal would feel it had the authority to undo the unification of Italy 130 years after the fact, but that seemed to be Count da Mosto’s hope.

  “How do you feel,” I said, “knowing that if Francesco’s team wins the Fenice contract, he’ll be helping to resurrect not just the Fenice but the Fenice’s royal box, which was originally built for Napoleon and later rebuilt by the Austrians?”

  “For the last fifty years,” the count said with a genial smile, “a large, gilded lion of St. Mark has adorned the pediment over the royal box. It’s not Napoleon’s royal box any longer, nor is it Austria’s. It’s ours.”

  SIX BIDS WERE SUBMITTED for the reconstruction of the Fenice. One, entered by Ferrovial of Madrid, was disqualified immediately because it lacked a mandatory anti-Mafia letter for one of its subcontractors. Anti-Mafia letters were documents stamped by the police, confirming that a check of the criminal database had turned up no mob connections for the company, either past or present. Despite furious protests that it had indeed submitted such a letter, Ferrovial’s application was rejected. Five candidates remained.

  The results of the competition were announced on June 2, 1997, a year and a half after the fire. No one was surprised when Agnelli’s Impregilo was declared the winner; Holzmann-Romagnoli had come in second. Curiously, however, the breakdown of scores revealed that Aldo Rossi’s design had been judged the best. Impregilo had earned enough points to take first place by promising to finish two months earlier than Holzmann-Romagnoli and at a cost of $45 million—$4 million less.

  Despite his disappointment, Francesco da Mosto seemed in good spirits when I encountered him on the street a few days later. “The losing bidders all have the right to examine the bid that finished just above them in the competition,” he said. “So I am going to have a look at Impregilo’s bid. I’m on my way to the Prefecture now. I don’t think I’m allowed to take anybody in with me, but if you’d like to come along, I’ll ask.”

  I accompanied da Mosto to the Prefecture, the huge Renaissance palace formally known as Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande, and we learned that indeed he alone would be admitted to view the Fenice bid materials. A porter ushered him into storage rooms on the ground floor, and I contented myself with a walk upstairs and a tour of the magnificent rooms of state on the Grand Canal. Half an hour later, we met again downstairs. Francesco had a strange look on his face. I could not tell whether he was amused, perplexed, worried, or angry.

  “What did Impregilo design for the new space?” I asked.

  “When I saw it,” he said, “I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This cannot be true!’ They had nothing. They left it blank.”

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Campo San Fantin came alive after nearly a year and a half of bleak, funereal stillness during which the Fenice’s charred shell had stood in silent rebuke to passersby, a depressing symbol of hopelessness. As the weeks passed, three towering cranes, standard-bearers of restoration and renewal, rose high in the air over the Fenice. Workers on scaffolding reinforced the theater’s outer walls. The sound of jackhammers and earthmoving equipment signaled that excavation and the sinking of concrete pilings for a new foundation were under way.

  Out on the Grand Canal, a four-thousand-square-foot platform was mounted on wooden pilings and enclosed by an eight-foot plywood wall. It was for storage of equipment and supplies. Cement mixers on the platform pumped liquid cement through underground tubes to the construction site. A brightly colored mural of the Fenice was painted on the plywood wall, reflecting the optimism that had suddenly taken hold in the city. On the second annive
rsary of the fire, January 1998, eight months into the reconstruction, a jubilant Mayor Cacciari held a press conference to announce that work was proceeding on schedule. As promised, the Fenice would reopen in September 1999.

  The mayor’s expressions of joy turned to a cry of anguish when, barely two weeks later, the State Council ruled on an appeal by Holzmann-Romagnoli and revoked Impregilo’s contract. According to the council, the preliminary plan had clearly indicated that the south wing was to include the new space. They quoted from the preliminary plan itself to show that bidders were not required to rebuild an exact replica of the Fenice: “It will be impossible to reproduce the theater as designed by Selva, rebuilt by Meduna, or modified by Miozzi. Nor can it be exactly as it was just before the fire. Even if painstakingly rebuilt, the new Fenice can only be, at best, an evocation of its former self.” Impregilo had been the only bidder to omit the new space, thereby giving itself an unfair advantage over the others by lowering the cost of its bid.