I accompanied da Mosto to the Prefecture, the huge Renaissance palace formally known as Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande, and we learned that indeed he alone would be admitted to view the Fenice bid materials. A porter ushered him into storage rooms on the ground floor, and I contented myself with a walk upstairs and a tour of the magnificent rooms of state on the Grand Canal. Half an hour later, we met again downstairs. Francesco had a strange look on his face. I could not tell whether he was amused, perplexed, worried, or angry.
“What did Impregilo design for the new space?” I asked.
“When I saw it,” he said, “I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This cannot be true!’ They had nothing. They left it blank.”
THREE WEEKS LATER, Campo San Fantin came alive after nearly a year and a half of bleak, funereal stillness during which the Fenice’s charred shell had stood in silent rebuke to passersby, a depressing symbol of hopelessness. As the weeks passed, three towering cranes, standard-bearers of restoration and renewal, rose high in the air over the Fenice. Workers on scaffolding reinforced the theater’s outer walls. The sound of jackhammers and earthmoving equipment signaled that excavation and the sinking of concrete pilings for a new foundation were under way.
Out on the Grand Canal, a four-thousand-square-foot platform was mounted on wooden pilings and enclosed by an eight-foot plywood wall. It was for storage of equipment and supplies. Cement mixers on the platform pumped liquid cement through underground tubes to the construction site. A brightly colored mural of the Fenice was painted on the plywood wall, reflecting the optimism that had suddenly taken hold in the city. On the second anniversary of the fire, January 1998, eight months into the reconstruction, a jubilant Mayor Cacciari held a press conference to announce that work was proceeding on schedule. As promised, the Fenice would reopen in September 1999.
The mayor’s expressions of joy turned to a cry of anguish when, barely two weeks later, the State Council ruled on an appeal by Holzmann-Romagnoli and revoked Impregilo’s contract. According to the council, the preliminary plan had clearly indicated that the south wing was to include the new space. They quoted from the preliminary plan itself to show that bidders were not required to rebuild an exact replica of the Fenice: “It will be impossible to reproduce the theater as designed by Selva, rebuilt by Meduna, or modified by Miozzi. Nor can it be exactly as it was just before the fire. Even if painstakingly rebuilt, the new Fenice can only be, at best, an evocation of its former self.” Impregilo had been the only bidder to omit the new space, thereby giving itself an unfair advantage over the others by lowering the cost of its bid.
Work on the Fenice stopped.
“The ruling is demented!” Mayor Cacciari declared. “The merits of this decision are way out of proportion to the damage done to the city and the country.”
The construction site was a shambles; no one in authority knew what to do. Officials in Rome and Venice, operating in near-panic mode, pleaded with the outgoing Impregilo and the incoming Holzmann-Romagnoli to cooperate with each other so as to achieve a quick and smooth transition. But that seemed unlikely, as events quickly became snarled in a tangle of complicated questions and disputes.
Would Impregilo be reimbursed for the $15 million it had spent already? Would Holzmann-Romagnoli honor the hundreds of contracts Impregilo had already signed with suppliers and craftsmen? Who would be responsible for the cranes, the leases for which were costing thousands of dollars a day, even with the site lying idle? Ditto for the scaffolding. And finally, could the partially built foundation designed by Gae Aulenti be adapted so that Aldo Rossi’s Fenice could sit on top of it? Or could Rossi’s design be altered to fit the foundation?
The man who could have answered the last of these questions most easily was, tragically, unable to do so. Aldo Rossi had been killed in an automobile accident in September. He had run off a winding road while driving to his house at Lago Maggiore. His associates in Milan would carry on. Francesco da Mosto, who had initially alerted Holzmann-Romagnoli that grounds for an appeal existed, would serve as liaison between the Rossi studio, Holzmann-Romagnoli, and the Comune of Venice.
Gae Aulenti’s reaction to the news of her unexpected expulsion from the Fenice project was to issue a terse comment: “To my successor, good luck.” It was, word for word, a proper thing to say, but in its brevity it carried the message that she was throwing up her hands in disgust.
Tonci Foscari’s response was somewhat more graceful. He wrote a letter to the
Gazzettino
praising Aldo Rossi’s design. He complimented Rossi on his decision to place the rehearsal hall on the ground floor, where it could double as a small concert hall and enlarge the Fenice’s audience. Foscari volunteered a few suggestions to the Rossi studio, in line with increasing the profitable uses of the Fenice. He proposed, for example, adapting the Apollonian rooms so they could function independently for parties and after-theater dinners. This would require planning for extra bathrooms, a catering pantry, and emergency exits. Foscari offered his proposals “as a natural evolution of Aldo’s thinking, and—in the memory of that faraway smile that lighted his face—they seem to me almost an act of respect.”
Gianni Agnelli said nothing at all about the court’s decision, and this was true to form. “L’Avvocato is the owner of Juventus, the Turin soccer team,” said Foscari. “Some weeks he wins, some weeks he loses. Complaining is not his style.”
Meanwhile, upon close inspection, Rossi’s architectural plan was found to be in violation of certain Venetian building codes. In order for the construction to go forward, either the laws would have to be changed or exceptions granted. The relevant officials, however, promptly declared it would not be a problem.
A more difficult issue was the privately owned building with the two apartments. The owners still refused to sell.
“ALL IT WILL TAKE IS MONEY,” Ludovico De Luigi said with a shrug. “Keep watching. Many more hands are going to reach into this pie before it’s over.”
De Luigi was sitting in front of his easel dabbing paint onto an image of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute as an oil platform suspended above a roiling sea confined within St. Mark’s Square. It was one of his familiar surrealist views of Venice. De Luigi’s studio occupied the ground floor of his house, and his windows looked out onto the small canal, the Rio di San Barnaba.
“The Fenice is putting on an opera,” he said. “An opera buffa—a comic opera.” He paused, reconsidering his words. “No, a tragicomic opera. But this opera is not on the stage. It’s in the audience. The spectators have become the performers. Politicians, building executives, architects. Everybody says they want to build the theater. But nobody really wants to build it. They are only interested in the fees. They want this opera to go on and on. They come in, they get some money, they do nothing, then they leave, and on the way out, they get some more money. Then other people come in, and they get some money, and so forth. They all make impressive designs, but you have to know what’s beneath. Ruthless people. Politicians.”
It was vintage De Luigi cynicism, but the real story was beginning to bear a resemblance to his vision of it and to the madness of his art.
“That’s why I paint the Apocalypse,” he said, applying white-caps to the waves in the sea that filled St. Mark’s Square. “I am a
svedutista,
a painter of negative landscapes, interior landscapes. I paint them as they exist in the mind. They are not abstractions. They are composed of recognizable features arranged in a surreal vision. They are portraits of our nightmares.”
De Luigi drew back and studied his darkly beautiful painting for a moment.
“They had to find somebody to blame for the fire,” he went on, putting brush to canvas again. “But not the politicians, of course. First they accused the Mafia. It took two years for them to decide it was not the Mafia. And now they’ve found the two poor electricians.” De Luigi shrugged. “They tell the electricians, ‘Listen, if you go to jail instead of me, you will have a big fat bank account when you get out.’ Whoever burned down the Fenice did not do it for political or philosophical reasons. It was for money.”
“If it had been out of anger at the Fenice,” I said, “I suppose the perpetrators would have made that known.”
“The Fenice does have its faults,” said De Luigi, looking up from his canvas. “The whole focus of performances at the Fenice has changed, and for the worse. It’s shifted from the love of art to narcissistic protagonism. Exhibitionism. It started the first time they put a spotlight on the conductor. It was for Herbert von Karajan. He was the first movie-star conductor. Conductors used to be in the dark. But von Karajan insisted on a spotlight, or there wouldn’t be any music.”
Ludovico De Luigi himself was no stranger to the spotlight. He bathed in one of his own devising. It illuminated his shoulder-length white hair, his imperial profile, and his outrageous antics. Tonight he glowed more than ever in his personal spotlight. He was wearing a tricornered hat edged in ermine, a ruffled shirt, red silk britches, and a dinner jacket on which he had painted lifelike red-and-orange flames. It was Carnival time again. Costumed revelers could be seen passing outside his window.
“For Carnival this year,” he said, “I am dedicating myself to the second anniversary of the night the Fenice became an empty shell. It may remain an empty shell forever. Who knows?”
We were joined shortly by Gianpietro Zucchetta, the bearded expert on bridges, canals,
acqua alta,
sewers, and fire. Zucchetta was accompanied by his wife, both in masks and eighteenth-century costumes, and a blond woman who was dressed as a courtesan. After a drink, we climbed into Zucchetta’s gondola, the replica of Casanova’s, which he had tethered to a pole in the canal in front of De Luigi’s house. De Luigi carried a small satchel on board and put it under the
felze,
out of sight.
“That’s for later,” he said, with a look of bemused expectation. “We’re going to do a
scherzo,
a joke.”
He turned to me. “Have you ever been arrested by the carabinieri?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” I said.
“Then this could be your night!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m going to break the law, and anyone with me might be considered an accomplice.”
De Luigi seemed to enjoy keeping me in suspense, so I did not ask what his
scherzo
entailed.
“Being arrested is good for the soul,” he said. “I was arrested for committing ‘obscene acts in public.’ It happened when I invited the porn star Cicciolina to inaugurate my horse sculpture in St. Mark’s Square, and she arrived topless. In a court of law I was declared an immoral person—a disreputable person!” De Luigi chuckled at the thought of it. “But for an artist, a reputation and a
dis
reputation are the same. An artist wants to be recognized, to attract attention.
“I became famous in Chicago,” he went on. “The police removed my paintings of nudes from a gallery on the grounds that I had painted ‘aggressive nipples.’ Of course, this made me very popular in Chicago.” De Luigi had another laugh, then looked up at me. “Does the thought of being arrested worry you?”
“Not if it’s for a good cause.”
“It’s for the Fenice.”
“Well, then, fine,” I said.
With Zucchetta rowing in front and a professional gondolier handling the stern oar, we made our way to the Grand Canal, where we turned right and headed toward St. Mark’s. De Luigi was laughing and joking, but I noticed he was looking up and down the canal, his eyes darting from boat to boat, looking to see who else was on the water, police boats in particular. We were passing the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.
“After the war,” said De Luigi, “Peggy Guggenheim used to give big parties. The servants would come out when it was over and give us ice cream and cigarettes. Whenever she had a party, my friends and I would stand on the Accademia Bridge and watch her guests dancing on the terrace. One night, Peggy reenacted the sinking of the
Titanic—
her father had died on it. She walked from her terrace into the water, completely nude. She took the orchestra with her. She had paid them to do it. The gondoliers had to rescue her.