Now, Venice unmasked

The truth is, people like to talk. Even when they probably shouldn’t. Even when they know John Berendt, his shrewd eyes belying a sympathetic smile, is sitting right across from them, absorbing every word, preparing to serve it all back up later in a stew of a book that will divulge their personal darkness to the world.

“People start out very guarded,” Berendt says, “and then they relax and tell you their story.” They talk over formal interviews and dinners, drinks and long walks. “They didn’t always realize my intentions were professional.”

They even talk on boats plying the canals of Venice, Italy, where Berendt spent a large portion of the last nine years working on his second nonfiction book, “The City of Falling Angels,” due in stores Tuesday.

It’s the tactic of the patient journalist, and Berendt has spun gold from the tales people have told.

His first book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” used a murder to open doors into the heart of Savannah, Ga., society. It became a cultural landmark of the 1990s, launching a mini-tourism renaissance among the mossy squares of the old Colonial town. And it helped re-establish the power of narrative nonfiction, joining Jonathan Harr’s 1995 “A Civil Action” among the biggest nonfiction sellers of the 1990s.

“The City of Falling Angels” follows a similar structure -- an outsider telling the story of a place as he comes to understand the local culture. In both cases, Berendt uses a crime as a pretext for rummaging around in other people’s lives. In Venice, it was the intentional burning of its famed opera house.

“A crime certainly does tend to focus the mind,” Berendt says. “It has a beginning, a middle and an end. But what was so good about this incident, the fire, is it got right to the heart of what Venice is concerned about -- its future as a livable city.”

There have been tangible rewards for Berendt. “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” spent more than four years on bestseller lists, and while critics generally panned the movie version, the check for the film rights didn’t bounce.

Berendt, a former Esquire columnist and editor of New York magazine, sank some of his windfall into buying and renovating a six-story townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where homes sell these days for $10 million or more.

The ground floor overlooks a small garden and the backs of the townhouses on the next street. A lone potted orchid sits in full bloom on the terrace railing. Inside, books and art pieces tastefully balance the room, like Berendt himself, legs crossed in a straight-back chair.

The shock of black hair that graced the back cover of his first book is now close-cropped and silvery. He’s wearing off-green slacks, a thinly striped shirt and loafers without socks, the uniform of a preppy in repose.

Berendt made the shift from magazine editor and writer to author hoping to delve more deeply into a subject than journalism allows, and to achieve something of relative permanence.

“Editing the weekly magazine was like catching fish barehanded in a stream,” Berendt says. “Then when I was doing the Esquire column, I wanted to get more involved in whatever it was I was doing. And all my work was being thrown out with the trash in a couple of months. If I wrote a book, I had something to show for it.

“Books can stay on the shelf for generations, and I thought it would be nice to give someone a calling card like a book.”

For his first book, Berendt spent a decade inserting himself into Savannah. Although he still wrote occasional pieces for Esquire, the people he was interviewing and hanging out with eventually disbelieved that he was working on a book. “After five years, I hadn’t written a book so they were sure I wasn’t, and I was just another one of their eccentrics,” Berendt says.

Venice was different. “Midnight in the Garden” had been translated into Italian, and the film was a staple of television movie channels. Those he met who hadn’t read it or seen the film did so quickly. “It opened some doors,” he says, “but it made some people wary.”

Berendt went to Venice in February 1996 knowing he wanted to place his second book there, but not knowing exactly what story it would tell. The answer came to him on a breeze, the smoke tinge of a fire a few days earlier that had gutted the city’s 200-year-old La Fenice opera house.

It was at least the third time the famed structure had turned to ash -- a chronic fate for a building named after the fabled phoenix. Again it was rebuilt, reopening in November 2004, more than three years after two electricians were convicted of setting the fire.

Despite the convictions, the reason for the arson and the extent of the electricians’ guilt remain murky. But that’s Venice, a changeling city where the truth can be as elusive as smoke, a good embellishment a work of art, and where Berendt says a storyteller who sticks to the facts is considered a bore.

Extravagant half-truths and outright lies are meant to distract, like the ornate designs decorating Venice’s centuries-old baroque and Italian Renaissance buildings.

“Venetians never tell the truth,” Berendt quotes local Count Giralamo Marcello in the book’s prologue. “We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

The quote can be read as a warning to the reader about how much to believe of what he is about to read. Yet Berendt insists the embellishments are limited to those offered by the Venetians themselves.

Cutting through falsehoods to the bones of truth was a laborious task, but Berendt is confident he has divined the real from the mirage.

“You can draw someone out, you know that they’re lying or exaggerating,” Berendt says. “It wasn’t that the people constantly lie to you. There’s a good deal of fantasy in Venice, which is encouraged by the surroundings. It’s like nowhere else on Earth. It doesn’t even look like a city that you’ve ever seen before.”

In recent decades, he says, the city has morphed into something of a medieval theme park. With little local industry, the economy is driven by trust funds and tourists. “Tourists have taken over, and the city is giving itself over to servicing the tourists,” Berendt says. “Hotels and gondoliers control Venice because that’s where the money comes in from.”

Venice could have rebuilt La Fenice as a modern, state-of-the art performance space, inserting a new hall within the surviving shell. Instead, the theater was painstakingly rebuilt, as a close replica of the way it was, like a working museum exhibit.

Berendt paints a sympathetic but not necessarily nice portrait of Venice, like a friend determined to tell you about your warts. Characters move through the book in sometimes uncertain ways, like the “chef” Massimo Donadon who proclaims that his creations are eaten around the world.

He makes rat poison, tailoring it to gastronomic regions because, he says, rats eat what people discard. Of late, he tells Berendt, he’s noticed American rats are eating plastic -- fallout of the fast-food diet.

Then there’s Ralph Curtis and his Barbaro Project to collect all the fire codes for the world’s nuclear weapons and dispatch them on a rocket to Mars. And the delightfully wacky Mario Moro, who traverses the cafes and canals of Venice in any of dozens of uniforms -- carabiniere, water-bus conductor, firefighter -- changing several times a day.

But there is venality too in the sleazy tussle over the estate of Ezra Pound; bad blood in a family of esteemed glassblowers over the father’s artistic legacy; and the power struggle within the Save Venice foundation, a group of mostly Americans who raise money for the restoration of imperiled Venetian buildings.

The struggle is a study in the dynamics of group politics, ego and immaturity as the group breaks into factions over styles of leadership and intent.

Berendt writes that on the night of an annual Save Venice social gala, the leader of the splinter Venice Heritage group schedules a rival dinner party, like a petty socialite wreaking revenge on a pretender. He invites as many people with European titles as he can command, seeking to take some of the bloom off the Save Venice event.

It’s an unflattering portrait of just about everyone involved, yet Berendt says he has heard from no one with serious complaints about the way they are portrayed.

As disparate as these stories are, they’re united in Berendt’s mind by a common thread. Each in some way reflects the present living off the past.

“Venice is a city of the past,” Berendt says. “People who live there are living off the remains of a civilization that ended 200 years ago. In a smaller way, in the Ezra Pound chapter, you have this sort of unseemly tussle for the remains of the poet.

“The carcass of the city, the carcass of the poet.... It’s the leavings, what’s left after something possibly better has already happened.”