Intrigue as ingress to the heart and soul of Venice

IN “The City of Falling Angels,” John Berendt does with Venice what he once did with and for Savannah in his “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” It is no easy task. Savannah -- though scarcely unknown -- was a town few writers had described; Venice, by contrast, is one of the most celebrated cities in the world. Books about its history, its art and architecture, and its mercantile and cultural importance for the last thousand years are legion; its buildings and canals have been painted and filmed without pause. A visitor must hunt to find the “truth” behind the wrought facades; as one of the characters here tells Berendt, “Everyone in Venice is acting.... Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

More daunting, perhaps -- and as Berendt admits -- it’s hard to be original about this fabled place. The town has compelled the imagination of writers great and minor since it emerged from the sea. As Henry James observed in 1882, “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.”

Marco Polo pronounced himself a citizen of the city, though the book that made his reputation, “The Travels,” reported on journeys elsewhere. In most subsequent accounts of Venice -- including “The City of Falling Angels” -- those who write of it do so as transients or tourists enchanted by the view. Sometimes a new way of living emerges; often the encounter proves fatal and romantic death ensues. Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers” and “The Wings of the Dove,” Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees” all report on arrival in town. William Shakespeare did not travel there, but two of his titles, “The Merchant of Venice” and “Othello: The Moor of Venice,” memorialize the name. Byron, Browning, Rilke -- the list of those who loved and wrote about the place would give most artists pause.

And Berendt may indeed have paused; this book has been years in the making.

According to his publishers, Savannah experienced a 46% rise in tourism as a result of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” which was published in 1994 and stayed on the nonfiction bestseller lists for a full four years. His second such effort -- its title derives from a sign, “Beware of Falling Angels,” placed near a construction site -- reads like a kind of sequel, as if the author told himself that his artistic treatment in “Midnight” could succeed in northern Italy as well. So he has followed his own precedent, and the strategies deployed to evoke the endearing eccentricities of a town in Georgia, culminating in a scandalous murder trial, are here as well.

Both books are steeped in local color, the more colorful the better; if there’s a “normal” character in Venice, we won’t find that character here. We meet glassblowers, surrealist painters, rat poison manufacturers, suicidal poets, social climbers and aristocrats down on their luck, new money arm-wrestling with old. We go along as fellow travelers to dinner parties and carnivals and coffee shops and bars. There are excursions into history and hints of corruption, erotic and romantic entanglements, lawsuits and family feuds. “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” was 388 pages; “The City of Falling Angels” is 394 (with a glossary and list of “People, Organizations, and Companies” attached). Subtexts and subplots embroider the tales, and -- as with the book on Savannah -- chapters have descriptive titles: “Slow Burn,” “The Rat Man of Treviso,” “Expatriates: the First Family,” “The Man Who Loved Others” and, finally, “Open House.”

A similar organizing principle attaches to both books; in the first, the through-line was murder; here, it’s a mysterious fire that guts an opera house. The historic La Fenice theater “in the heart of Venice” burned to the ground on the night of Jan. 29, 1996; after a succession of false investigative starts and bureaucratic tangles and scandals, it reopened about eight years later, and “The City of Falling Angels” follows that narrative arc. The slogan “Com’era, dov’era” -- “As it was, where it was” -- becomes a kind of rallying cry for those who rush to rebuild. Once again, the bricks and mortar of a city -- grand mansions and salons -- engage Berendt’s attention and compel his eye.

It’s an eye for vivid detail, accompanied by an ear attuned to gossip. We learn of the unhappy legacy of Ezra Pound, the complicated jockeying for power and position in the Save Venice foundation and the collapse of the Curtis family, whose Palazzo Barbaro served as the model for Palazzo Leporelli in “The Wings of the Dove.” In both books, the author deploys the first person -- though we learn remarkably little about that “I” -- and compiles a set of portraits of a city’s citizens. Some Berendt respects or grows fond of; others he dislikes. As was the case in Savannah, he is introduced to the power elite and has quotable encounters with people of the street. Every once in a while he embraces cliche, as in: “This remarkable voice materialized, upon my arrival, in the form of a strikingly beautiful woman in her late forties with large, wide-set, smoky-blue eyes, a broad smile, and a billowing mane of shoulder-length brown hair.” But he writes, for the most part, with flair.

The fire in the Fenice is first considered arson, then ruled out as arson, then reconsidered as arson; the trial results in the conviction of two electricians who may indeed be guilty but who almost certainly did not act alone or of their own volition. This provides an open-ended closure; we never get the sense that all the prosecutor’s questions have been answered -- motive and culpability remain as murky at book’s end as at the start. The entire trial is “ ‘worse than absurd,’ said Dr. [Mario] Scattolin. ‘It’s contradictory, hypocritical, irresponsible, dangerous, dishonest, corrupt, unfair, and completely mad.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Welcome to Venice.’ ”

Another of the “colorful” characters, the cynical artist Ludovico de Luigi, puts it best about the trial:

“ ‘Yes, but this is the sort of ending Venice can live with, happily and forever.’ He daubed gold paint on the canvas. ‘Look what the story offers: a great fire, a cultural calamity, the spectacle of public officials blaming each other, an unseemly rush for the money to rebuild the theater, the satisfaction of a trial with guilty verdicts and jail sentences, the pride of the Fenice’s rebirth, and’ -- he lifted his brush and looked up -- ‘an unsolved mystery. Money secretly changing hands. Unnamed culprits hiding in the shadows. It stimulates the imagination, gives people the freedom to make up any scenario they want. What more could anyone ask?’ ”

The city of Venice could not handle and would probably not welcome a 46% enlargement of its tourist trade. But De Luigi serves, I’d venture, as a spokesman for his listener Berendt. For those who have not been there, this book will whet an appetite to go, and those who know the city well will yearn, in reading, to return. Vaporetto-loads of visitors, soon, are likely to be saying, “What more could anyone ask?” *