The crowd in front of the Fenice drifted across the campo to the Ateneo Veneto for the town meeting. The Great Hall was already filled to overflowing. People stood at the rear and along the sides of the room, while the speakers milled around nervously in front. The audience buzzed with conversation and conjecture.
A woman standing near the door turned to another woman. “There are no accidents,” she said. “Just wait. You’ll see.” The other woman nodded in agreement. Two men discussed the middling quality of the Fenice’s resident company in recent years, especially the orchestra. “It’s a shame the Fenice had to burn,” one said to the other. “A pity it wasn’t the orchestra.” A young woman, arriving at the hall out of breath, made her way toward a young man who had saved a seat for her. “I haven’t told you where I was the night of the fire,” she said as she slipped into her seat. “I was at the cinema. The Accademia was showing Senso. Can you believe it? The only movie that has a scene shot inside the Fenice. Visconti made it look like the 1860s, so it was lit by gas lamps. Gas lamps! Little fires inside the Fenice! Then afterward I came out and saw people running and shouting, ‘The Fenice! The Fenice!’ I followed them to the Accademia Bridge, and then I saw the fire. I thought I was dreaming.”
Several of the Fenice’s immediate neighbors had come to the meeting and were adjusting in various ways to living in the shadow of a ghost. Gino Seguso said that since the fire, his father had been spending most of his time at the glassworks, turning out vases and bowls to commemorate that awful night. “He’s made more than twenty so far,” he said, “and he continues to prepare more quantities of molten glass. My father said only, ‘I have to make them,’ and we have no idea when his passion will run its course. But the pieces are beautiful, every one of them.”
Emilio Baldi, the owner of the Antico Martini restaurant, gloomily estimated the losses he would suffer for the months, if not years, during which the view from his restaurant would be a noisy construction site instead of a lovely square. “There has been one hopeful sign,” he said, managing a weak smile. “We had eight tables of diners when the fire broke out, and naturally everybody took their coats and left in a hurry. Since then seven of the eight have come back and insisted on paying their bill. Perhaps that means things will turn out all right eventually.”
I took a seat beside an elderly English lady who was showing the couple in front of her a little square of painted canvas the size of a postage stamp. It was charred around the edges.
“It’s a piece of scenery,” the lady said. “Isn’t it sad?”
“We found it on our altana,” her husband chimed in. “We live at Palazzo Cini and were having dinner at the Monaco. Suddenly the waiters seemed distracted and went away from the dining room. We asked if there was anything wrong, and they told us there seemed to be a fire near the Fenice. We went up to the roof of the Saturnia Hotel, which has a splendid view of the Fenice. The fire was right in front of us, so close that Marguerite’s fur coat was singed. A little while later, as we walked home, clouds of sparks blew overhead.”
“Terrifying,” said his wife. “The next morning our altana was covered in ash. Christopher found this little square of burnt canvas. It had blown all the way across the Grand Canal.” She wrapped the charred relic in a handkerchief and put it back in her purse. “I don’t suppose we shall ever know what opera it came from.”
THE MEETING WAS OPENED by the general manager of the Fenice, Gianfranco Pontel, who wept and swore he would not sleep soundly again until the Fenice was rebuilt and back in operation. Pontel, a political appointee with no musical background, said he saw no reason to resign, as several people had publicly demanded he do.
Following Pontel, one official after another came forward to bewail the fate of the Fenice, pray for its resurrection, and absolve himself of any blame. As they spoke, high above them on the coffered ceiling, legions of tormented souls languished in Palma Giovane’s Cycles of Purgatory, in silent mockery of their every word.
Mayor Cacciari, his black hair tousled, came to the microphone. The day after the fire, he had announced that the city would rebuild the Fenice within two years and that it would be rebuilt just as it was before, rather than as a modern theater. He revived the old slogan Com’era, dov’era (As it was, where it was), first invoked in the campaign to build an exact replica of the Bell Tower in St. Mark’s Square, the Campanile, after it collapsed in 1902. The city council quickly ratified Cacciari’s decision.
Today the mayor repeated his promise. He was forthright about the rationalizations that kept running through his mind. “Afterward you invent ten thousand excuses,” he said. “You tell yourself, ‘You can’t simultaneously be the custodian of the Fenice, the police, the public utilities, the fire department. You cannot be expected to keep watch over the city house by house, church by church, museum by museum.’ You can say all these things to yourself, but you keep thinking, ‘No, it’s not possible, this cannot happen. No, it didn’t happen. The Fenice cannot burn....’”
Though the audience was clearly unhappy, the august setting of the Ateneo Veneto served to enforce a measure of civility, if not quite the usual pin-drop silence. The assemblage gave voice to its general disgruntlement by maintaining a constant murmur that rose and fell in response to the remarks of the speaker. There came a point, however, when actual words leaped out of the undertone, distinctly audible words, angry words, sharply spoken and coming from among the standees on the left side of the hall.
“When we elected you,” the voice called out to Cacciari, “we gave you the most beautiful theater in the world, intact! And you have given it back to us in ashes!” The voice belonged to the painter Ludovico De Luigi, freshly returned from New York, where his spontaneous painting of the Fenice on fire had been auctioned off by Save Venice to benefit the Fenice. De Luigi, his face flushed, his white hair flowing, pointed an accusing finger at the mayor. “It’s a disgrace!” he shouted. “Somebody has to take responsibility! If not you, then who?” The murmuring swelled to a buzz, and the buzz was punctuated by the syllables of De Luigi’s name: “Ludovico, -vico, -vico, -vico.”
Members of the audience craned their necks in half-embarrassed expectation. Would this outburst turn into one of Ludovico’s happenings? Were his nude models waiting in the wings? Would he haul out another version of his bronze viola sculpture, the one with a large phallus protruding from it? Would he let rats out of a cage as he had once done in St. Mark’s Square? Apparently not. De Luigi had not had time to bring anything to this meeting but himself.
Mayor Cacciari looked wearily at him. “Venice is unique,” he said. “It’s like no other place on earth. One cannot expect me or any other elected official to assume responsibilities beyond what’s reasonable and normal.”
“But that’s why we elected you,” said De Luigi. “We put you in charge, whether you accept that or not! And you!” he bellowed, now pointing his finger at the startled general manager, Pontel. “For God’s sake, stop that sniveling! You’re like a baby whose toys have been taken away. Do the honorable thing. Resign!”
Satisfied that he had made his point, De Luigi subsided, and a superintendent stepped forward to say that the task of rebuilding the Fenice would help revive old crafts that no longer existed in Venice. There would be a need for artisans who could reproduce, by hand, the wood and stone carvings, the sculpted stucco and papier-mâché, the parquet floors, the paintings, the frescoes, the gilding, and the richly intricate fabrics for curtains, tapestries, and upholstery. The loss of the Fenice was a tragedy, he said, but the rebuilding of it would create a renaissance of all the old crafts. The cost of the reconstruction would be upwards of $60 million, but money would not be a problem, because Rome recognized the value of the Fenice as a national treasure. The money would come.
The woman by the door nudged her friend. “What did I tell you? There are no accidents.”
The last to speak was a vice mayor. “Venice is a city of wood and velvet,” he said. “The damage could ha
ve been much worse. . . .”
The audience filed back out into the sunlight of Campo San Fantin, where the two cigarette-smoking policemen were now engaged in banter with a trio of pretty young girls. They were explaining that they would love to take the girls into the theater for a peek at the wreckage, but it had been sealed by the police, and nobody could go in. Ludovico De Luigi’s voice rang out as he headed away in the company of friends. “I meant to insult them! Let them be angry.” He gestured at the Fenice as he passed it. “Venice once had twelve opera houses. Now we have none. One more nail in the coffin. Look at it! An empty shell. Just like Venice.”
THE DEATH OF VENICE HAD BEEN PREDICTED, pronounced, and lamented for two hundred years, ever since 1797, when Napoleon brought the once-mighty Venetian Republic to its knees. At the height of its glory, Venice had been the world’s supreme maritime power. Its reach had extended from the Alps to Constantinople, and its wealth had been unequaled. The architectural variety of her palaces—Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, neoclassical—chronicled an evolving aesthetic shaped by a millennium of conquests and their accumulated spoils.
But by the eighteenth century, Venice had given itself over to hedonism and dissipation—masked balls, gaming tables, prostitution, and corruption. The ruling class abandoned its responsibilities, and the state became enfeebled, powerless to resist Napoleon’s approaching army. The Great Council of the Venetian Republic voted itself out of existence on May 12, 1797, and the last in the line of 120 doges resigned. From that day forward, there had been no doges in the Doge’s Palace, no Council of Ten in the Great Council Chamber, no shipbuilders turning out warships in the Arsenal, no prisoners shuffling across the Bridge of Sighs on the way to the dungeons.
“I will be an Attila for the Venetian state!” Napoleon had thundered—in Italian so as not to be misunderstood. He proved good to his word. His men looted the Venetian treasury, demolished scores of buildings, pulled precious stones from their settings, melted down objects of gold and silver, and carted off major paintings for installation in the Louvre and the Brera Museum in Milan.
Venice emerged from its defeat an impoverished provincial village, unable to do much more than settle into a languid and picturesque decline. It is this Venice that we have come to know—not the triumphant and arrogant conqueror but the humbled and crumbling ruin.
The fallen Venice became a symbol of faded grandeur, a place of melancholy, nostalgia, romance, mystery, and beauty. As such, it was irresistible to painters and writers. Lord Byron, who lived in a palace on the Grand Canal for two years, seemed almost to prefer the decaying Venice—“Perchance even dearer in her day of woe, / Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.” Henry James saw Venice as a much-used tourist attraction, “a battered peep-show and bazaar.” John Ruskin, focusing on the city’s architectural riches, hailed Venice as “the paradise of cities.” To Charles Dickens, Venice was a “ghostly city,” and for Thomas Mann it was a darkly seductive curiosity—“half fairy tale, half snare.”
I understood why so many stories set in Venice were mysteries. Sinister moods could be easily conjured by shadowy back canals and labyrinthine passageways, where even the initiated sometimes lost their way. Reflections, mirrors, and masks suggested that things were not what they seemed. Hidden gardens, shuttered windows, and unseen voices spoke of secrets and possibly the occult. Moorish-style arches were reminders that, after all, the unfathomable mind of the East had had a hand in all this.
In the soul-searching aftermath of the Fenice fire, Venetians seemed to be asking themselves the very questions that I, too, had been wondering about—namely, what it meant to live in so rarefied and unnatural a setting. Was there anything left of the Venice that Virginia Woolf described as “the playground of all that was gay, mysterious and irresponsible”?
This much I knew: The population of Venice had been declining steadily for the past forty-five years—from 174,000 in 1951 to 70,000 at the time of the Fenice fire. The rising cost of living and the scarcity of jobs had caused a migration to the mainland. Venice was no longer impoverished, however. On the contrary, northern Italy now had one of the highest per capita incomes in Europe.
Because of its two centuries of poverty, the city’s architectural heritage was still remarkably free of modern intrusions. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had left barely any mark on it at all. Walking through Venice now, one still encountered a succession of vistas that looked much as they had when Canaletto painted them in the eighteenth century.
WITHIN DAYS OF MY ARRIVAL, I began to consider the idea of extending my stay and living in Venice for a while. I had learned basic Italian grammar at the age of sixteen, when I spent the summer in Torino as an exchange student living with an Italian family, and it had stayed with me. I could read the newspaper with ease, understand the spoken word passably, and speak well enough to make myself understood.
I decided I would live in an apartment, not a hotel. I would walk around the city with a notebook and, on occasion, a small tape recorder. I would have no fixed agenda, but I would look more at the people who lived in Venice than at the eleven million tourists who filed through it every year.
In preparation for this undertaking, I reread the classic texts. They were not at all encouraging. Mary McCarthy put it bluntly in Venice Observed: “Nothing can be said [about Venice] (including this statement) that has not been said before.” McCarthy’s parenthetical comment, “including this statement,” was an allusion to Henry James, who had written in “Venice,” an 1882 essay, “There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. . . . It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say. . . . I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it.”
These declarations were not as forbidding as they seemed. Mary McCarthy was referring mainly to clichéd observations about Venice that people mistakenly think they have originated—for example, that St. Mark’s Square is like an open-air drawing room, that Venice at night resembles a stage set, and that gondolas are all painted a funereal black and look like hearses. Henry James was reacting to the overabundance of travelogues and personal reminiscences of Venice, which was an ultrafashionable travel destination in his day.
My interest, in any case, was not Venice per se but people who live in Venice, which is not the same thing. Nor, apparently, had it been a common approach in books about Venice. The best-known novels and movies set in Venice tended to be about people who were just passing through: Death in Venice, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers, Don’t Look Now, Summertime, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Comfort of Strangers. The main characters of all these stories, and many more besides, were neither Venetians nor resident expatriates. They were transients. My view of Venice would focus on people who, for the most part, lived there.
Why Venice?
Because, to my mind, Venice was uniquely beautiful, isolated, inward-looking, and a powerful stimulant to the senses, the intellect, and the imagination.
Because, despite its miles of tangled streets and canals, Venice was a lot smaller and more manageable than it seemed at first. At eighteen hundred acres, in fact, Venice was barely twice the size of Central Park.
Because I had always found the sound of church bells pealing every fifteen minutes—close at hand and distant, solo and in concert, each with its own persona—a tonic to the ears and nerves.
Because I could not imagine a more enticing beat to assign myself for an indefinite period of time.
And because, if the worst-case scenario for the rising sea level were to be believed, Venice might not be there very long.
{3}
AT WATER LEVEL
I TOOK AN APARTMENT IN CANNAREGIO, a residential quarter sufficiently removed from the main tourist thoroughfare that it still retained its old neighborhood atmosphere: housewives shopping at the open-air food market, children playing in the squares, the Venetian dialect making a lilting singsong of the spoken word. Fo
otsteps and voices were, in fact, the dominant sounds in Venice, since there were no cars to drown them out and very little vegetation to absorb them. Voices carried with startling clarity through the stone-paved squares and alleys. A few fleeting words spoken in the house across the calle sounded surprisingly close, as if they had been uttered by someone in the same room. In the early evenings, people gathered in clusters to gossip in Strada Nuova, the main street of Cannaregio, and the sound of their mingled conversations rose in the air like the buzz of a cocktail party in a large room.