The Fenice’s house lights did not dim when the music started, because the evening was being televised, which meant that the baroque hall would be as bright as a TV studio all night. The theater’s subtleties would be lost, at least for now. I closed my eyes and listened to the music. After Beethoven came Igor Stravinsky (buried in Venice), Antonio Caldara (born in Venice), and Richard Wagner (died in Venice). I concentrated on the sound. Were the acoustics a success? The experts had said they were. But, of course, for people sitting in boxes, especially toward the rear of the boxes, the sound quality would never be as good as it was for people sitting out in the open.
The most distinctive sounds in Venice, however, were not really the ones inside the Fenice. Jürgen Reinhold, the Fenice’s master acoustics engineer, had put his finger on it when he expressed surprise at having discovered that the ambient nocturnal sound level in Venice was a very low thirty-two decibels. Forty-five decibels was typical of most other cities. The absence of automobile traffic, of course, accounted for the difference. “All this Venetian quietness has me bewitched,” Reinhold had said. “When I came back to my house in Munich, the noise was unbearable. But it was only the usual traffic sounds.”
I, too, had been bewitched by the peacefulness of Venice, and by much more about Venice besides. What had at first been largely an attraction to the city’s beauty evolved into a more generalized enchantment as time went on. From the very start I had kept Count Marcello’s cautionary words in mind: “Everyone in Venice is acting. . . . Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”
I knew that in Venice I had been told truths, half-truths, and outright lies, and I was never entirely sure which was which. But time often clarified matters. Only a few days before the Fenice reopened, for example, I had come upon a revealing piece of information while I was walking along the arcade of the Doge’s Palace. I noticed a plaque with the name “Loredan” inscribed on it. I thought immediately of Count Alvise Loredan, the man I had met at the Carnival ball, who had held up three fingers as he told me, more than once, that there had been three doges in his family.
That much was quite true.
Count Loredan also told me that a fifteenth-century Loredan had defeated the Turks and thereby prevented them from crossing the Adriatic and wiping out Christianity. There was, in fact, a well-known Pietro Loredan who had defeated the Turks in the fifteenth century. But the man commemorated on the plaque at St. Mark’s was a
seventeenth-
century Loredan named Girolamo, a coward who had been exiled from Venice in disgrace for having abandoned the fortress of Tenedos to the Turks, “to the great detriment of Christianity and [his] country.”
Alvise Loredan had been under no obligation to wash his family’s dirty linen in front of me. His deception was harmless enough, and I accepted it as part of the act, part of the perpetual myth and mystery of Venice.
When the concert was over, I came out into Campo San Fantin, where I noticed a man with two scarves draped around his neck—one white silk, one red wool—standing at the center of a burst of flashbulbs. It was Vittorio Sgarbi, the art critic who had made himself persona non grata at the Courtauld Institute in London by walking out with two rare books in his satchel. Sgarbi was posing for photographers with one arm slung around Signora Ciampi and the other clasped around the waist of a woman wearing a cap of pearls. Sgarbi had
not
been made Italy’s minister of culture, as it had been rumored he might be; he had been named undersecretary of state for culture, a lesser but still prominent position—and a surprising one, under the circumstances.
At the edge of the
campo,
a dozen silk-stockinged men in black capes and tricornered hats were waiting to escort the eleven hundred members of the audience to boats headed for the Arsenal and a great celebratory banquet. Teams of party planners had been working on the decorations for weeks. The
Gazzettino
had scheduled an early printing of the next day’s newspaper—December 15, 2003—so that as guests took their seats at the banquet, they would be greeted by a glorious, full-color photograph of the Fenice splashed across the paper’s front page. World events had intervened during the day, however, and as a consequence, tonight’s guests would sit down instead to a page-one photograph of a grubby and bewildered Saddam Hussein, who had been captured in Iraq only hours earlier. But no matter.
Having dinner with a thousand people did not appeal to me especially, and anyway I had other plans. I left Campo San Fantin and walked along Calle della Fenice toward the rear of the theater, then over a small bridge to the house on Calle Caotorta, where I paid a visit to Signora Seguso, now the widow of the maestro Archimede Seguso, the “Wizard of Fire.”
We stood at the window where Signora Seguso had seen smoke rising from the Fenice eight years earlier, and from which Archimede Seguso had watched the fire all night. Signora Seguso said she did not care to look out the window at the Fenice anymore, because in spite of all the talk about
“com’era, dov’era,”
the Fenice was definitely not “as it was” before the fire—not from her window, at any rate. The Fenice’s north wing, thirty feet across the canal, had been rebuilt several feet taller than it used to be, and an array of metal ducts, pipes, and fences had been mounted on top, making the view look more like the industrial landscape of Marghera than the lovely vista of terra-cotta rooftops that she and her husband had enjoyed before.
No smudge, no scar, no trace or telltale sign of the fire remained anywhere in sight, except for the swirling, spiraling chips of color embedded in the tall black vase on Signora Seguso’s bedside table. This vase had been the first of the more than a hundred “Fenice” pieces that Archimede Seguso had made as his unique, eyewitness account of the fire. He had brought this one home as a gift for his wife.
And where were the others?
Signora Seguso sighed. It had been ten years since she had spoken to her younger son, Giampaolo. Her husband’s estate was still the subject of a legal battle, four years after his death, and the “Fenice” bowls and vases were at the center of it. Until a court could decide their fate, those creations of love and fire would remain locked in a storeroom at the glassworks—seen by no one, gathering dust.
GLOSSARY
Italian words are defined the first time they appear in the text. The following words occur more than once:
acqua alta
High water, i.e., high tide.
altana
An open rooftop deck, usually wooden.
buongiorno
Hello, good day.
calle
A narrow street; plural:
calli
.
campo
An open square or plaza; plural:
campi
.
capito
Understood.
carabiniere
The national police, or policeman; plural:
carabinieri
.
cassazione
Appeals court.
ciao
Hello, also good-bye. Used in the familiar.
“com’era, dov’era”
“As it was, where it was.” The slogan adopted for the rebuilding
of the Fenice Opera House, exactly as it had been before
it burned.
comune
Municipal government.
doge
The head of state of the former Venetian Republic.
lira
Italian monetary denomination, before introduction of the
Euro; plural:
lire
.
magazzino
Storeroom, warehouse.
marchesa
Marchioness, ranks above a contessa, below a duchess; the
masculine is
marchese
.
palazzo
Palace.
piano nobile
The principal floor of a palace.
ponte
Bridge.
portego
The central hall of a palace.
prosecco
Sparkling white wine, produced in the Veneto region.
putti
Babies, children, or cherubs in paintings and sculpture.
ridotto
Lobby, foyer.
rio
Canal in Venice; elsewhere, a stream, a brook.
salone
Large drawing room.
scherzo
A joke.
stucchi
Sculpted plaster decoration.
tu
You, the familiar form.
vaporetto
Water bus.
PEOPLE, ORGANIZATIONS, AND COMPANIES
Argenti
A Roman construction firm that subcontracted electrical work to Viet for the renovation of the Fenice Opera House.
Aulenti, Gae
Architect associated with the Impregilo consortium and architect Antonio (Tonci) Foscari in their bid to rebuild the Fenice Opera House.
Berlingieri, Marchesa Barbara
Vice president of Venetian Heritage, formerly of Save Venice.
Bernardi, Nicola
Fruit-and-vegetable dealer. Friend of poet Mario Stefani.
Cacciari, Massimo
Mayor of Venice, philosopher, university professor.
Carella, Enrico
Owner of Viet, a small electrical contracting company working at the Fenice Opera House.
Carella, Lucia
Mother of Enrico Carella, housekeeper at the Cipriani Hotel.
Carella, Renato
Father of Enrico Carella, foreman of his son’s work site at the Fenice.
Casson, Felice
Prosecutor.
Cicogna, Countess Anna Maria
Board member of Venetian Heritage, formerly of Save Venice; daughter of Giuseppe Volpi, who was finance minister under Mussolini; half sister of Giovanni Volpi.
Cipriani, Arrigo
Proprietor of Harry’s Bar.
Corriere della Sera
Milan-based daily newspaper.
Costa, Paolo
Mayor of Venice after Massimo Cacciari, former rector of Ca’ Foscari University and Italy’s minister of public works.
Curtis family
(American) Owners and residents of Palazzo Barbaro since 1885. First generation, orginally of Boston: Daniel and wife, Ariana; second: Ralph and wife, Lisa; third: Ralph and wife, Nina; fourth: Patricia, Ralph, Lisa; fifth: Daniel, son of Patricia.
da Mosto, Count Francesco