“Something very strange is happening in Italy,” he said. He motioned for me to move toward the corner of the room, where we could hear each other better.
“I’ve noticed,” he said, “that in the past few years Italian rats have begun to prefer eating plastic to Parmesan cheese.”
“Really!”
“My entire business, if you remember, is based on the idea that rats eat what people eat.”
“Yes, of course I remember.”
“But people don’t eat plastic!” he said. “I thought, ‘My God, I’m ruined! What am I going to do? Rats are beginning to eat food that human beings don’t eat! This cannot be true!’”
Then, just as quickly, Donadon’s face perked up again.
“At last it came to me!” he said. “Plastic is a nonfood. True?”
“Yes, absolutely,” I said.
“And I realized:
People eat nonfood, too.
”
“We do?”
“Yes! We eat fast food! Fast food is nonfood! Plastic is the rats’ equivalent of fast food! It means that all is well: Rats are still imitating the eating habits of people, and, like people, they are losing their taste for natural food. They are going for junk food.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.
“I’ve already done it!” said Donadon triumphantly. “I’ve put granulated plastic in my Italian rat poison!”
“Does it work?” I asked.
“Like a dream,” he said.
I congratulated Donadon on his new success and started working my way toward the auditorium and the stairway to the third tier. On the stairs, I encountered Bea Guthrie. She had flown over from New York for the opening, accompanied by the new president of Save Venice, Beatrice Rossi-Landi. Save Venice had been a major donor to the Fenice, contributing $300,000 for the ceiling.
I took my seat and looked out at the five gilt-encrusted tiers of boxes. They were dazzling, but the colors were noticeably brighter and fresher than they had been in the old theater. The gilt, in fact, looked new. I expected, however, that when the lights were dimmed for the concert, it would all tone down a bit. For now anyway, the bright lights made it easier to see the details and look at people.
There were no movie stars in sight, nor would there be. Pacino, Irons, and Fiennes were fogbound in Luxembourg.
Downstairs on the orchestra level, Princess Michael of Kent, tall and blond, a coronet twinkling in her hair, stood in the center aisle, chatting with the ballerina Carla Fracci. The princess’s hostess, the Marchesa Barbara Berlingieri, hovered close by her side, turning when the princess turned, pausing when the princess paused. Larry Lovett approached to say hello. Lovett’s new Venetian Heritage had been a great success. He had wisely chosen a somewhat different mandate from that of Save Venice by funding restorations not only in Venice but throughout the old Venetian Republic—in Croatia, Turkey, and elsewhere. Although Venetian Heritage had not contributed to the rebuilding of the Fenice, Lovett had been given two choice seats in the orchestra, on the aisle. That might account, I thought, for the look of displeasure on Bea Guthrie’s face as she climbed higher and higher toward
her
complimentary seat, all the while coming closer and closer to the Save Venice-sponsored ceiling. Whether her seat assignment had been the result of a consensus within the Fenice hierarchy or the work of a lone antagonist, the insult could not have been more obvious. Larry Lovett was clearly still the favorite among Venetians with power.
A hush came over the audience as members of the Fenice orchestra took the stage and began tuning up; the chorus filed in behind them. I looked around the hall and recognized a man sitting in a box directly across from me. He was scanning the crowd through a pair of opera glasses, and it occurred to me that he might have been looking for Jane Rylands. Mrs. Rylands had recently taken people by surprise by publishing a book of short stories set in Venice. Some of her fictional characters appeared to be based on real people, or certain aspects of real people, or combinations of real people. The man with the opera glasses had discovered a number of uncomfortable similarities between himself and a character who was the butt of a particularly vicious satire in Jane’s book. Jane insisted that all of her characters were total fabrications. However, at a recent Guggenheim reception, Philip Rylands had engaged the man in conversation, and at one point lightheartedly referred to an innocuous detail of the man’s ancestry, not realizing that this detail had been invented by Jane as part of her character’s thin disguise.
The man stared icily at Philip.
“That’s true, isn’t it?” Philip asked, referring to the ancestral detail.
“Only in your wife’s book!” the man replied.
Jane Rylands had wisely steered clear of any character or plot-line that would remind anyone of Olga Rudge or the Ezra Pound Foundation. But one of her most belittling caricatures bore a twisted resemblance to a woman who had been among her most vocal critics at the time of the Ezra Pound Foundation imbroglio. This and other unsympathetic portraits created the impression that Jane Rylands had used the stories as a score-settling device.
As for the now-defunct Ezra Pound Foundation, one of its would-be assets, the Hidden Nest cottage of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, was currently providing a substantial rental income for their daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. Pound memorabilia had been increasing in value. In 1999, Mary de Rachewiltz had offered for sale, through Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, 139 of her parents’ books, which had been stored for years in Brunnenburg Castle. They included signed first editions of the
Cantos
and books by other authors, many with marginal notations by Pound and Rudge. Horowitz’s asking price came to a total of over $1 million, prompting people to wonder what the 208 boxes of Olga Rudge’s papers, sold to the Ezra Pound Foundation for $7,000 in 1987, and later to Yale for an undisclosed sum, might now be worth on the open market.
Riccardo Muti strode onto the stage, his glossy black hair falling into his eyes. He bowed, raised his baton, and led the orchestra in the Italian national anthem. The audience, rising to its feet, turned toward the royal box at the rear of the hall and saluted the presidential couple with a sustained ovation. Standing at the Ciampis’ side in the royal box were the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Angelo Scola, Mayor and Maura Costa, and former prime minister Lamberto Dini, whose wife, Donatella, had broken the news of the fire at the Save Venice Ball in New York eight years earlier.
My gaze drifted up to the lion of St. Mark’s, mounted atop the royal box like a burnished diadem in exactly the spot once occupied by the insignias of France and Austria. It reminded me of what Count Ranieri da Mosto had said about the royal box: “It’s not Napoleon’s royal box any longer, nor is it Austria’s. It’s ours.”
The gift to the city of an eight-foot statue of Napoleon had sparked an intensely emotional debate over whether to accept it. The statue had been commissioned in 1811 by Venetian merchants who were grateful to Napoleon for turning the city into a free port. It had stood in St. Mark’s for two years until Venice fell to the Austrians in 1814. After that, it was lost for two hundred years and had only recently surfaced at Sotheby’s in New York, where the French Committee to Safeguard Venice had bought it for $350,000 in order to make what they had assumed would be a welcome gift for Venice.
The moderates, including Mayor Costa and the director of civic museums, Giandomenico Romanelli, argued that Napoleon and the statue were simply part of Venice’s history and therefore worthy of being displayed. The anti-Bonapartists, whose ranks included Count Girolamo Marcello, Count da Mosto, and most of the center right, countered that on those grounds one could argue that the bronze bust of Mussolini in storage at the Correr Museum should be displayed as well.
The debate rang with endless recitations of Napoleon’s thefts, desecrations, and other outrages against Venice. Virtually everyone took one side or the other. Peter and Rose Lauritzen were vocal anti-Bonapartists. I dropped in on a lecture Peter was giving to a group of English students in the Accademia. The first words I heard him say were, “Napoleon saw to the suppression of forty parishes in Venice and the destruction—
razed to the ground!
—of one hundred and seventy-six religious buildings and more than eighty palaces, all of which were decorated with paintings and other works of art. In addition, Napoleon’s agents saw to the listing for confiscation of twelve thousand paintings, a great many of which were sent to Paris to enrich the collections of something called the Musée Napoleon. I trust if any of you have been to Paris you have been to the Musée Napoleon. Today it’s rather better known as the Louvre, and of course it is the single greatest monument to organized theft in the history of art!”
A poll conducted by the
Gazzettino
showed the public to be 12 to 1 against accepting the statue. Nevertheless, Mayor Costa did accept it, and in the dead of night it was smuggled into the Correr Museum, where it was installed in a niche behind a protective shield of Plexiglas. Months later the anti-Bonapartists brought Napoleon before an ad hoc Nuremberg-style tribunal and found him guilty as charged.
At the height of the controversy, the leaders of the antistatue coalition sent two menacing letters to Jerome Zieseniss, the head of the French committee, advising him to get out of town. Zieseniss expressed his outrage, and city officials hastened to condemn the letter writers. Though tempers had since cooled, the gift of the statue was still widely resented as an insult to Venice. In spite of all that, however, Zieseniss had been given two excellent seats at the Fenice’s reopening. He was sitting in the orchestra beside the chairman of the World Monuments Fund, Marilyn Perry.
The concert opened with Beethoven’s “Consecration of the House,” which was, of course, an apt choice. It put me in mind of the comment Robert Browning made in 1890 to his son, Pen, upon learning that Pen and his rich American wife had bought the enormous Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal. “Don’t be a little man in a big house,” Browning warned. Henry James, visiting the Curtises at Palazzo Barbaro a bit farther down the Grand Canal, wrote to his sister about the news, “[Palazzo Rezzonico] is altogether royal and imperial—but ‘Pen’ isn’t kingly and the
train de vie
remains to be seen. Gondoliers ushering in friends from pensions won’t fill it out.” Three years later, James wrote to Ariana Curtis, “Poor, grotesque little Pen—and poor sacrificed little Mrs. Pen. There seems but one way to be sane in this queer world, but there are many ways of being mad! and a palazzo-madness is almost as alarming—or as convulsive—as an earthquake—which indeed it essentially resembles.” Pen Browning had not filled out Palazzo Rezzonico in any memorable way. In fact, it was Robert Browning himself, ironically, who stole the honors from his son by dying in the house and being remembered by a plaque attached to the façade.
The Curtises had “filled out” Palazzo Barbaro admirably for over a century. And, now that the Barbaro had passed into the hands of Ivano Beggio, the proprietor of the motorcycle maker Aprilia, Venice was watching to see how well the Beggios would fill it out. Beggio had wasted no time seeing to the cleaning of the Barbaro’s double façade. He removed important paintings from the
piano nobile
for cleaning and restoration.
But then . . . nothing. Months, then years, went by. The windows of the
piano nobile
remained boarded up. The Beggios were rarely seen in Venice. Specialists hired to work on the restoration were utterly perplexed. Speculation abounded that the Beggios had hoped that their ownership of Palazzo Barbaro would lead to their acceptance in Venetian society and that they had been disappointed when it did not.
Then the truth emerged. Ivano Beggio was broke! The phenomenally successful Aprilia motorcycle company was facing bankruptcy. Palazzo Barbaro was once again for sale—but not for the $6 million Beggio had paid the Curtises for it. The new asking price was said to be $14 million. No offers had yet been made, and, tragically, none would be forthcoming from the young, idealistic Daniel Curtis—the only Curtis in five generations to have any Venetian blood in his veins. Daniel had died suddenly from an aneurysm at the age of forty-seven. For a full week after his death, loving notices had appeared in the
Gazzettino.
One in particular captured the spirit of all the others: DANIEL. “A friend forever,
a great Venetian.
”