Costa tried to assure a doubtful public that, as absurd as it might sound, this was the fastest, cleanest way to get the job done. He was speaking now as a former minister of public works. He was saying, Trust me. The whole process would have to start all over again with a new call for competitive bids. The boldest part of Costa’s action was to declare that Venice, not Holzmann-Romagnoli, owned Aldo Rossi’s architectural design and that Venice was going to build it, working with Rossi’s associates in Milan but not with Holzmann-Romagnoli. Costa was confident he would prevail in any court battle.
Holzmann-Romagnoli writhed and thrashed and refused to leave the work site until Costa sent the police to roust them out. On April 27, 2001, Venice once again had custody of the Fenice, but work had come to a virtual halt. A single company stayed on the job, working on the foundations, while Costa looked for a new contractor.
Eight construction companies responded to the new solicitation for bids. One letter, however, arrived fifteen minutes after the deadline, and Costa rejected it. He was in no mood to tolerate lateness.
From the assembled bids, Costa chose the Venetian construction company Sacaim, an outfit well accustomed to operating in the difficult environment of Venice. Sacaim had worked on a great many important Venetian buildings, including Palazzo Grassi and the Malibran Theater. Nor was it a stranger to the Fenice: Sacaim had been the principal contractor for the renovation in progress the night the Fenice burned.
In early March 2002, after a hiatus of eleven months, Mayor Costa erected a large digital clock outside the Fenice to keep the workers and the public informed of the number of days remaining until Sacaim’s November 30, 2003, deadline. When Sacaim took physical possession of the Fenice on March 11, the clock read 630 days.
The count was down to 614 when I put on a hard hat and joined Laura Migliori in the Dante Room. It had been two years since she had first taken a look at the blackened walls, but only two weeks since she had been able to begin work. She and her assistants had already removed the overlay of mud and soot from the frescoes. Now, with further treatment, they would erase some of the deeper stains and bring out the colors. In five of the six panels, only fragments of the frescoes remained. However, two-thirds of the
Inferno
panel had survived. There were three figures in the foreground. A man in a red robe was fully intact, but only the lower halves of the other two were left.
“I’m pretty sure the one in red is Dante,” said Laura, “and we think one of the others is Virgil. When we do color testing, we hope to find out which. We’ll be looking for traces of green, because he wore a laurel wreath.”
Much of the work on the Fenice would be completed away from the site and then brought to the theater to be installed. Guerrino Lovato, the owner of the Mondonovo mask shop, had been hired to make the models for all the three-dimensional ornaments for the theater hall. He rented a
magazzino
across the street from his shop to use as a studio where he would sculpt the clay models for the satyrs, nymphs, sylphs, caryatids, angels, animals, flowers, vines, leaves, lattices, shells, horns, scrolls, suns, moons, masks, swags, and swirls that would adorn the parapets of the boxes and the walls and ceiling of the theater. From his originals, sculpted in clay, his assistants would make the negative plaster molds in which ornaments would be cast in papier-mâché and plaster by craftsmen in Mogliano; his assistants would make positive molds to be copied by wood-carvers in Vicenza. To make sure that the ornaments would fit snugly onto the curving contours of the theater, which did not yet exist, Lovato checked his work against a full-size model of half the theater that had been erected in a warehouse in Marghera.
Laura Migliori and her two assistants would have to restore the
Inferno
frescoes right where they were, in the midst of workmen putting large structural elements in place, installing air-conditioning ducts and electrical cables, and carrying out such other tasks as painting, plastering, welding, soldering, applying gold leaf, and laying floors of terrazzo and parquet. She would be working, in other words, surrounded by chaos—and happily.
“We all have a feeling of exhilaration,” she said. Her efforts, like those of everyone else, would be part of an attempt to re-create the Fenice as it was designed after the 1836 fire so that, as the architect Giambattista Meduna put it at the time, “no part will be diminished in flamboyance [and] those who see it will say that the magnificence of the decorations of Versailles are no more splendid.”
As to whether the former opulence, magnificence, and flamboyance could be regained, Laura Migliori would say only, “We’ve made a start. We’ve got the mud off.”
THE OPERA MUSIC BLASTING out of the protesters’ loudspeakers on the fifth anniversary of the Fenice fire carried across the Grand Canal to the Palace of Justice, where, as it happened, prosecutor Felice Casson was making his closing remarks in the arson trial of Enrico Carella and Massimiliano Marchetti. The charge of attempted murder had been set aside in an earlier session.
Casson sat alone at a table in the high-ceilinged chamber wearing black robes over a collarless shirt and facing a panel of three judges. He spoke for five hours, detailing the case against the two electricians. The defendants and their lawyers sat at tables behind him. Enrico Carella wore a dark suit, a silk tie, and polished black shoes; Massimiliano Marchetti was dressed in a sport jacket, corduroy pants, a plain tie, and work shoes. Both were subdued. Carella shifted nervously in his chair.
Casson told the story of the fire in a meticulous, spellbinding narrative—the workers leaving the theater at the end of the day, Carella pouring solvent on a pile of planks of wood upstairs in the
ridotto
in preparation for setting the fire later on, Carella and Marchetti hiding as the last of the workmen left, Carella using a blowtorch to ignite the fire while Marchetti stood lookout, the fire creeping, then roaring, through the theater. Casson’s narrative was accompanied by a computerized, three-dimensional reenactment shown on four large television monitors placed around the courtroom.
In the course of his recitation, Casson made it clear that he had placed the two young electricians under near-constant, almost obsessive surveillance.
In one conversation, taped after a lengthy interrogation at police headquarters, Carella and Marchetti had gotten into their car unaware that it had been bugged. Their behavior at this moment, Casson said, was significant:
“They get into the car, and you would think that after what they’d been through they would blurt out, as any normal, innocent person would, ‘They’re crazy! This is madness! What do we have to do with the Fenice?!’ Instead Carella says, ‘Mauro better get his story in line.’ They were worried about somebody named Mauro. They were hiding him. Then Massimiliano tells Enrico that he didn’t mention Mauro’s last name to the police, and Enrico answers, ‘Good, perfect!’”
The recording was the first time Casson had heard mention of Mauro Galletta, a fishmonger who lived near the Fenice. According to Casson, Carella and Marchetti wanted to keep his existence unknown for two reasons. First, a few hours before the fire, Galletta had come to the Fenice at Carella’s request to take photographs of the electrical work that Carella’s company was doing at the time. Those photographs, once they came to light, proved that Carella was way behind schedule and faced a penalty charge, which Carella had repeatedly denied. The prospect of a penalty was central to Casson’s explanation of a motive; it was just as important to Carella’s defense to prove he was not facing a penalty. Second, after leaving the Fenice, Carella and Marchetti had
not
gone directly to the Lido as they had said; they had gone to their friend Mauro Galletta’s house to smoke marijuana and eat pizza. According to Galletta, they arrived at his house a little after nine o’clock. This would have made it impossible for them to have reached the Lido by nine-fifteen, as they had claimed.
Casson now estimated that it was not until ten o’clock that Carella and Marchetti had left for the Lido, where Carella claimed he had received the call telling him about the fire.
“By the time they were crossing the lagoon on the way to the Lido,” said Casson, “the sky was all lit up. How could they
not
have known about the fire?” Carella had offered an absurd explanation, said Casson: They had been sitting with their backs to Venice.
Casson’s surveillance picked up two virtual confessions from Carella and Marchetti. A plainclothesman sitting behind them on a vaporetto overheard Marchetti say to Carella, “Don’t worry, I won’t rat on you.”
Then, in a conversation taped after a particularly grueling police interrogation, Marchetti was heard to say, “We’re both going to jail,” to which Carella replied, “They’ve got us. They’ve really got us.” Casson read these two quotes to the court, adding dryly that he had omitted the profanities from both remarks.
One of the most damaging blows to Carella’s credibility came from an unexpected source: his father, Renato Carella. When Renato Carella was asked how he had heard about the fire, he said his son had called to tell him at 10:10 P.M. That was twenty minutes before the first mention of the fire on television, but Enrico Carella had claimed that
he
had learned about the fire from someone who had just seen it on TV. Was Renato Carella sure about the time? Yes, he said, he was positive.
In fact, Renato Carella had become the mystery man in the case. He had set up his son’s company for the sole purpose of receiving the electrical subcontract from Argenti in Rome. Renato Carella was then hired by Argenti to serve as its liaison at the Fenice. When Casson announced his original list of defendants in 1998, Renato Carella had not been among them. But Casson had named three suspects who were still under investigation. Two were Mafia bosses from Palermo. The other was Renato Carella. The Mafia bosses had since been dropped as suspects, but Carella remained in Casson’s sights even at this late date, and Casson intended to keep him there indefinitely.
“I’D LIKE TO KNOW MORE about Renato Carella myself,” said Giovanni Seno, Massimiliano Marchetti’s lawyer, during a one-hour break in Casson’s closing remarks. I had gone downstairs to take a walk in the Rialto food market and found myself in lockstep with Seno. We started talking. Seno still had his air of cocky confidence, but I could tell he was worried. Casson had built a strong case, and Seno no longer argued that the fire had been caused by negligence. He now claimed that the hapless Marchetti was in the dark “about what was going on that night.” He did not say the same for Enrico Carella, and he admitted that he had suspicions about Renato Carella. As we spoke, he kept looking around as if to make sure he was not being overheard.
“Look,” he said, “I’m going to tell you some things you may not know. About how contracting and subcontracting work in Italy. Behind these big contracts—and this is just between you and me—there is almost always favoritism, some politics, and maybe a little bribery. I’m not saying that’s what happened in this situation, but it would be unusual if it didn’t. The way it works is this: A big company like Argenti wins a contract and then dumps all the work onto subcontractors who do the job as cheaply as possible. The big company doesn’t do any of the work themselves. It doesn’t send laborers. It does nothing. It gets the contract for, say, seven hundred fifty million lire [$375,000] and then turns around and hands out jobs to subcontractors for maybe six hundred million [$300,000]. The company makes a profit without lifting a finger. It goes on all the time, and it’s not illegal. Now, in this case, certain people suspect that maybe—just maybe—it was Renato Carella, the lowly foreman, who secretly won the contract for Argenti.”
“How?”
“Maybe he had inside information. Maybe he knew the costs or what other competitors were bidding, but since he wasn’t a registered contractor, he couldn’t bid for the job himself. So he passes this valuable information to Argenti. Argenti tailors its bid to fit Renato’s information and wins the contract. To show their gratitude, they throw some money Renato’s way by subcontracting part of the work to a company Renato sets up for his son—a company that, bear in mind, didn’t exist before, that had no track record. And then Argenti hires Renato as the foreman. Have I explained myself?”
Seno leaned a little closer. “The way I figure it, Renato Carella, my client’s uncle, was the one in control, the one who had the real power. It’s not clear to me exactly how. I don’t have specific information, but this guy is an operator. Right after the fire, even though he was under suspicion for arson, Renato Carella got another big public subcontract, this one at the Arsenal. He took Enrico along on that job, too.”