“The firemen didn’t know in advance that the canal at the Fenice was empty and closed, and they should have. They had to turn back and go down another canal, wasting precious minutes.
“All they had with them were old canvas hoses, three of which broke and had to be fixed.
“They had old wooden ladders, which were too short to reach the windows.
“They didn’t have fire-repellent uniforms.
“They didn’t have canisters that release oxygen-absorbing chemicals that literally suffocate a fire. This is standard equipment for fighting fires in empty buildings today. The firemen were inadequately equipped, and that’s the fault of Pini and Corbo, the so-called experts.”
In response to these charges, Casson explained that the fire chief, Alfio Pini, was included in the panel in order to provide safe access to the Fenice and help the panel obtain anything it felt it needed in the way of evidence. Leonardo Corbo, the director of Italy’s civil protection, had a lengthy list of credentials as an expert in fires and firefighting, with special expertise relating to fires in theaters. Though Casson coolly dismissed D’Elia’s objections, it was noted that the telltale flush in Casson’s face had reached a dangerous shade of pink.
Casson had been the magistrate on call the night the Fenice caught fire, which meant that he was the first city official the police and fire departments were supposed to contact in case of an emergency. In the excitement, they forgot. However, Casson lived with a woman who was a television journalist for RAI; they were at home in Cannaregio when she received a call from RAI about the fire. They went up to their
altana
and saw the flames. Five minutes later, Casson was in a police launch on the way to the Fenice. He arrived on the scene in time to witness a territorial dispute between the local police and the national police, the carabinieri. Both were claiming they had arrived at the fire first. A police officer was saying to an officer of the carabinieri, “In any case, we have jurisdiction in the city, and you don’t,” and the carabiniere countered with, “But we are better equipped to handle this kind of investigation than you are.” Casson performed his first official act of the night by intervening and telling both sides that the office of the public prosecutor was responsible, so he, Casson, would decide who was in charge of what.
Shortly before midnight, Casson went to police headquarters, the Questura, and signed an order sealing the theater and making it a crime for anyone to enter it without authorization. His intention was to protect the integrity of the evidence, and to do that he was willing to keep the theater sealed for months if necessary. He would not permit salvage crews to move any of the debris until the investigators had finished their work. He even rebuffed the superintendent, who was struggling to arrange a benefit concert for the Fenice and wanted to retrieve files on major donors from his office, which was in a part of the building that was not completely destroyed.
Casson gave the panel of experts sixty days to complete their technical analysis of the evidence and issue a final report. He wanted answers to eleven questions: the time and place the fire started; whether the cause was arson or negligence; the time of the “flashover,” when the fire spread to other parts of the theater; the condition of the theater before the fire; the extent of fire-prevention systems inside and outside the theater; the situation regarding the canals around the Fenice; the condition of smoke and fire detectors prior to the fire; the nature of substances present in the theater at the time of the fire; analysis of the ashes from the
ridotto;
a description of the wiring in the theater; and, finally, an estimate of damages and identification of those responsible for any dangerous conditions.
It was generally assumed that the panel’s ultimate conclusions would confirm its preliminary finding, which, as the
Gazzettino
reported, ruled out arson “with near-mathematical certainty.”
Leonardo Corbo, the civil protection chief from Rome, had been named chairman of the panel. He announced that they would study the rubble of the theater with forensic precision, as if the Fenice were a corpse laid out on an autopsy table.
“Every fire has its DNA,” he said, “its black box. Fires leave certain indelible traces. Some are obvious and can be identified at a glance. Others cannot be seen with the naked eye but can be analyzed with the help of sophisticated technologies and instruments, which, fortunately, we have.”
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE FIRE, courtesans and Casanovas began appearing in the streets of Venice, the former in low-cut bodices and silk stockings, the latter in knee breeches, all in powdered wigs. People in masks, capes, gowns, frock coats, buckled shoes, and all manner of silly hats swarmed through the streets from early morning till late at night in celebration of Carnival. A mime, his hands, face, and hair painted silver to match his silver clothes, stood stock-still at the foot of the Accademia Bridge, a statue in monochrome. A circle of onlookers stood around him, watching for the slightest blink or tremble to assure themselves they were looking at a live person. Another mime, this one solid gold, struck poses in St. Mark’s Square; a third, pure white, stood immobile for thirty minutes in Campo San Bartolomeo, near the Rialto.
The colorful celebration swirling through the streets was actually a recent revival of the centuries-old Venetian festival. Napoleon had put an end to it when he defeated the Venetian Republic. By then Carnival had reached the height of decadence, having grown from a two-week period of merrymaking to six months of parties, dances, spectacles, games, and walking around Venice behind masks, incognito. It was not until the late 1970s that a serious revival took place; it was prompted in part by Federico Fellini’s exotic and surreal 1976 film
Casanova.
The reincarnation of Carnival started in a small way, on the island of Burano and in working-class neighborhoods, with plays and costume parties in the local squares
.
Before long the revels became citywide, then tourists started joining in, and finally an industry grew up around them, the most noticeable feature being the mask shops opening all over Venice. They were little nooks of color and fantasy, their stage-lit windows lighting up darkened side streets all year long. Soon masks were a favorite tourist icon. But with the appearance of each new mask shop, there always seemed to be one less greengrocer, one less bakery, one less butcher shop, to the consternation of Venetians, who found themselves having to walk twice as far to buy a tomato or a loaf of bread. Mask shops became a detested symbol of the city’s capitulation to tourism at the expense of its livability.
One mask shop, however, was spared any such opprobrium. It was Mondonovo, the studio of Guerrino Lovato, a sculptor and set designer, who had been instrumental in resurrecting Carnival back in the days when it was attended only by Venetians. Lovato had started making masks in his sculpture studio, almost as a public service. They were a beloved novelty, and his studio became the first mask shop in Venice.
Mondonovo was a few steps beyond the Ponte dei Pugni, the “Bridge of Fists.” The front of the shop was cluttered with sculpted objects piled on shelves, hanging on walls, suspended from the ceiling, leaning, standing, and stacked on the floor. There was hardly any room for customers to move. In addition to masks, Signor Lovato and his assistants also made figurines, busts, cherubs, escutcheons, and various pieces of architectural ornamentation in the baroque rococo style. But masks predominated.
Signor Lovato was a muscular man with a dense, dark beard turning white. The day I met him, he was wearing a bulky gray sweater and a knitted cap. While a young assistant sat at a worktable applying gold paint to a papier-mâché mask, Signor Lovato showed me the classic Carnival masks, starting with the earliest, which were based on the commedia dell’arte characters—Pulcinello, Pedrolino, Harlequin, the Plague Doctor, and Brighella. The mask for each character was distinguished by a salient feature: a hooked nose, a long nose, a wart on the forehead.
“By the eighteenth century,” Lovato said, “people were wearing masks in public most of the time, and for one reason only—to be anonymous. So the most popular masks then were plain ones that covered the whole face and represented no characters at all. They, too, have become classics.” He showed me two: a plain black mask for women, called a
morello,
and a white mask for men, called a
bauta,
which had a jutting, prowlike nose and a jaw that came all the way down to the chin. The
bauta
was usually worn with a tricornered hat.
While the
bauta
had no expression at all, its ghostly pallor and sharp features gave it a malevolent look. So I decided to buy a conservative, dark purple mask of the Lone Ranger variety to wear at the Carnival ball the Lauritzens had invited me to attend.
As I was paying the young assistant, I peered over her shoulder into Signor Lovato’s workroom. Large photo art books were strewn about the place, propped up and open to photographs of the Fenice—the golden tiers of balconies, close-up shots of sculptured figures and gilded ornamentation.
“I see you’re studying the Fenice,” I said.
“A disaster!” said Lovato.
“Do you expect to have a hand in the reconstruction?”
“Who knows? There aren’t many of us left who do this kind of work.” He motioned for me to come into his workroom.
“There’s a tremendous amount of sculptural detail that will have to be remade,” he said. “But, unfortunately, nothing survived the fire, and the original drawings have been lost. About the only documents that remain are old engravings and photographs. The trouble is, they are only two-dimensional. A thousand photographs of the same figure will all look different, depending on the lighting, the lens, the camera, the angle of the shot, and the color reproduction.”
He picked up one of the books. It was open to a photograph of a creamy white mermaid rising from a swirl of gold-leaf waves and curlicues. “There were twenty-two of these beautiful nymphs around the periphery of the ceiling. They were almost three-quarter life size. If just one of them had survived, even partly, it could answer a lot of questions, but they’re all gone.” He turned to a photograph of a cherub. “Putti,” he said. “Four of them were playing little wind instruments in the royal box, and there were hundreds of other figures intertwined in the gold-leaf foliage all around the theater, some of them half hidden. It will take detective work to find them all and then a lot of patience to duplicate them. That is . . . if the Fenice is ever rebuilt.”
“Why wouldn’t it be rebuilt?” I asked.
“Everybody wants it to be rebuilt. But this is Italy. The opera house in Genoa, which was bombed during the Second World War, didn’t reopen until 1992, forty-eight years later. The Teatro Regio in Turin burned in 1937, and that one took thirty-seven years to be rebuilt.”
“But isn’t the Fenice even more important symbolically to Venice than those were to Genoa and Turin?”
“Yes,” said Lovato, “because of its role in the history of opera. And the design of it makes it even more deeply symbolic of Venice than most people realize. I’ll show you what I mean.”
He thumbed through one of the books until he came to a diagram of the Fenice.
“The audience comes in here, through the Apollonian entrance wing, which is neoclassical in style. Apollo is the god of the sun, the god of order and reason. The rooms are formal and symmetrical, and although the decoration is opulent, it is very restrained. Then, as the members of the audience pass from the Apollonian wing into the auditorium, they suddenly find themselves in the midst of a fantastic forest glade, flamboyantly decorated with flowers, vines, faces, masks, satyrs, nymphs, cherubs, griffins, and other mythical creatures. This is the exuberant realm of Dionysus and Bacchus, the ancient gods of wine and revelry.
“The dichotomy between the two cults—Apollonian restraint and Dionysian abandon—is very important to the Italian theater, and particularly to Venice. Do you know the difference between Apollonian music and Dionysian music? Apollonian music is the music of the city, and that includes opera. It has a codified form and follows accepted structural norms.
“The music of Dionysus is the music of the countryside. It is improvised music, spontaneous, without structure, formless. Nowadays we would call it pop music. It evokes a sense of pure pleasure. It is the music of oblivion, of alcohol, of wine and drunkenness . . . of Dionysus and Bacchus.