Venice on a High Note
Read Berendt's Best-Seller, Then See the New Opera House

By John Pancake
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 11, 2005

Something was in the air that February day as one of America's top authors skimmed across the lagoon toward Venice.

The something was charcoal and the writer was John Berendt. The acrid smell filling his nostrils came from the embers of one of the world's most famous opera houses, La Fenice, which had been gutted by fire three days earlier. The year was 1996.

Berendt was coming off a huge success. He had wrapped a menagerie of characters around a bizarre murder and the seamy side of Savannah to produce a delicious read, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Now he was on the prowl for a new book, and the mysterious fire would prove very convenient for him. Suspiciously convenient. ("Look, I have an alibi," he says. "I can show you the stamps on my passport.") Okay, maybe he didn't start the fire, but he did make the most of it. The book that grew out of the operatic ashes, "The City of Falling Angels," topped the best-seller lists earlier this fall.

It's pretty irresistible. If you haven't been to Venice, Berendt's book may make you want to go. If you are planning to go, "Falling Angels" is a great way to get ready. And if you have read it, a visit to the resurrected La Fenice (feh-NEE-chay) will certainly be on your wish list.

I spent six days in Venice in early October and the book made me want to investigate it. The opera house sits on a small square in the heart of the city, a couple of minutes' walk from St. Mark's Square. The facade, with its statues of the Muses of tragedy and dance, is impressive but does not begin to suggest the wonders it holds.

Inside, it is a place of staggering opulence with gilded filigree, crimson upholstery, bare-breasted nymphs and a swirl of fantasy. Five tiers of boxes line the horseshoe-shaped theater. Traditionally, wealthy nobles entertained inside these ornate stalls, glancing at the opera only now and then. If you stand in the middle of the theater, it feels very much as if you've been encircled by Marie Antoinette's wedding cake.

La Fenice is also one of the things that holds Venice's idea of itself together.

No Tourist Zone

I had been reading about Venice for five years before my first visit this fall. My wife and I stayed for six days, it rained every day and I didn't care. (My wife did buy a pair of fisherman's boots to negotiate the wet streets.)

We timed our visit so that we'd arrive after Oct. 1, when the worst of the tourist hordes are gone. And we shied away from traditional tourist pursuits. We didn't ride in a gondola. We didn't go into St. Mark's Cathedral. We didn't buy Venetian glass.

Instead, we roamed the back streets. I was anxious to see the work of the great Venetian painters -- Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. Every corner of the city seems to have a church with more magnificent art, and we prowled the streets in search of them. I'm a birder, so I never travel without binoculars. They turned out to be very handy for some of the masterpieces on the ceilings of churches. Our favorites were the tiny Santa Maria dei Miracoli, on Campo dei Miracoli in Cannaregio, and the lavish Scuola Grande di San Rocco, on Campo San Rocco, San Polo district.

We did very little shopping. My best purchases were a pair of velvet Venetian slippers ($20), ice cream from a sidewalk vendor near Campo San Rocco and a pair of handmade shoes for my wife.

Our principal foray into the tourist latitudes was to the Doge's Palace, seat of government and home of the city's elected ruler for centuries. The art and architecture made it worth wading through crowds, and the size and intricacy of it, right down to the Bridge of Sighs that leads to the dungeon, provides an unforgettable look at the grandeur that was Venice.

For centuries, this unlikely city, built on wooden stakes driven into mud, was one of the most important in the world. Its navy ruled. Its merchants flourished. Its art dazzled. Its smug lion was a symbol of immense power.

Today, Venice is magical and enchanting. But it is also crumbling and sinking. It has lost 60 percent of its population in the past half-century and is now at 63,000, less than the city of Tuscaloosa, Ala. Venetians don't like to hear it, but cold-eyed observers suggest it is a dying city.

In a metropolis swimming in tourists, La Fenice remained one of the places Venetians still gathered with Venetians. It was one of the vital organs of the city, and the fire incinerated it.

"I decided the fire should be part of the structure of the book because it was such a challenge to Venice itself," Berendt says. "It once had 12 opera houses. Only La Fenice remained. After the fire, there was no opera house there, no major stage of any kind, no heartbeat. Without it, Venice was really a dead city. They had to rebuild it to prove they were alive."

La Fenice Rises Again

La Fenice ("The Phoenix") gets its name from the mythical bird that burns itself on a pyre and then flies up out of the ashes with renewed youth.

The group that built La Fenice, the Noble Association of Boxholders, chose the name more than two centuries ago not because there had been a fire but because they'd been evicted from another theater and made a comeback with one of the grandest opera houses in the world.

The first version of La Fenice arose in 1792, just two years before the guillotine fell on the queen of France. The building didn't last long. In 1836, it was devastated by a fire started by a new heater. (An Austrian heater, Venetian historians point out.) Only the facade and the ornate rooms around the foyer survived.

The Noble Boxholders hired the Meduna brothers, Giambattista and Tommaso, to rebuild. The Medunas slathered the inside of the hall with impossibly lavish gilded rococo excess that is almost beyond imagination -- balconies encrusted with cupids, poets, allegories, musical instruments and rosy Muses in diaphanous gowns. Almost every inch of the walls bursts with golden wreaths, vines, filigree and curlicues. A trompe l'oeil ceiling shows a blissful blue sky filled with glittering stars and swirling with cupids and pink-cheeked maidens. Also prominent was the blue and gold symbol of the opera, designed by Giambattista Meduna: an angry, somewhat scaly bird vaguely resembling a cormorant equipped with a bill that looks as if it could open a can of soup.

In some ways, Venice is the birthplace of opera, says Patrick Smith, longtime editor of Opera News. It is certainly the birthplace of the notion of an opera house with a paying audience. That was before La Fenice, but the stage there saw its share of history.

At its best, what took place at La Fenice was at least as glittering as what the Medunas spackled across the interiors. Gioachino Rossini composed "Tancredi" and "Semiramide" for the Venetian palace. Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti composed great works for La Fenice. Giuseppe Verdi wrote four operas for the house, including "Simon Boccanegra" and his masterpiece "La Traviata." He wrote the final act of "Traviata" in one of the ornate salons of La Fenice.

In more recent times, Stravinsky premiered "The Rake's Progress" at La Fenice, and opera greats, including Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, made debuts here.

All that was swallowed by a fire mysteriously kindled somewhere high in the opera house on Jan. 29, 1996. The building was undergoing renovations. It wasn't clear what caused the fire. Venetians, for whom nothing is ever what it seems, hatched bushels of theories about whom to blame: city government (which now owns the opera house), sloppy contractors, faulty wiring, the mob . . .

Ultimately, the cause was less important than finding a way to rebuild the house. There was some sentiment for producing a modern opera house. But in the end, Venice decided it wanted Fenice the way it had been -- "as it was, where it was."

There were some additions: more room backstage so that it would be easier to store opera sets; additional rehearsal spaces; an exquisite hall called Sala Rossi, seating 190 for chamber music concerts; a new entrance from the canal behind the opera (named for Callas).

The rebuilding took seven years, thanks in part to baroque entanglements with the government. But as anyone who has been to Venice can imagine, undertaking a major construction project in the middle of the city is a nightmare. The "streets" around the opera house are barely wide enough for three people to walk abreast, so everything had to come in on boats and barges. Because La Fenice lies deep within the rib cage of Venice's most historic district, bringing in the kind of giant cranes needed for a project like this was an elaborate puzzle.

In addition, the fire did not entirely consume La Fenice. The facade and the ornate rooms near the entrance -- the same chunk that had survived the 1836 fire -- were still standing, and the rebuilders had to somehow avoid giving those ancient walls a tap.

But against the odds, the city succeeded. The opera reopened.

And while carpenters were hammering away on the building, a remorseless prosecutor was hammering away at the mysterious cause of the fire.

The Final Word

Getting to the bottom of anything is difficult in Venice. The prologue of "Falling Angels" closes with the words of one of the city's most distinguished citizens, Count Girolamo Marcello: "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say."

No surprise, then, that when the prosecutor accused two lowly electricians of torching La Fenice, no one believed it was the whole truth. One of the two men charged vanished before trial and has never been found. His father, a suspected link to shadowy "big boys" who might have paid for the arson, died of lung cancer. The other defendant, a sad sack whom Berendt described as "perhaps the most inarticulate man I have ever interviewed," was eventually convicted.

The Venetian painter Ludovico De Luigi, who provides incendiary insights throughout the book, had the final word on the verdict:

"The father's dead, the trail goes cold, and the mystery lingers on," said De Luigi with a chuckle. "It's all about money as usual. Not love -- money. The perfect ending for Venice."

John Pancake is editor of The Post's Sunday Arts section. To comment on this article, send e-mail to travel@washpost.com.