The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt Read Free Book Online

midwinter: I would see it without the obscuring overlay of other tourists. For once I would have a clear view of Venice as a functioning city. The people I saw in the street would be people who actually lived there, going about their business purposefully, casting familiar glances at sites that still had the power to stop me in my tracks. But as I came across the lagoon that morning in early February 1996 and caught the first faint whiff of charcoal, I realized I had arrived in Venice at an extraordinary moment.
     
     
    A stunning, full-color, aerial photograph of Venice dominated the front page of the morning’s Il Gazzettino. It was a panoramic view of the city taken the day after the fire, with the burned-out Fenice at the center of it, a faint plume of smoke rising from its blackened crater as if from a spent volcano. “Never again! No more pictures like this,” the newspaper promised its readers.
     
     
    There had been an outpouring of sympathy for Venice. The opera singer Luciano Pavarotti had announced he would give a concert to help raise funds to rebuild the Fenice. Plácido Domingo, not to be outdone, said he would also give a concert, but his concert would be in St. Mark’s Basilica. Pavarotti shot back that he, too, would sing in St. Mark’s, and that he would sing there alone. Woody Allen, whose jazz band was to have reopened the newly renovated Fenice with a concert at the end of the month, quipped to a reporter that the fire must have been set by “a lover of good music,” adding, “If they didn’t want me to play, all they had to do was say so.”
     
     
    The destruction of the Fenice was an especially brutal loss for Venice. It had been one of the few cultural attractions that had not been ceded to outsiders. Venetians always outnumbered tourists at the Fenice, so all Venetians felt a special affection for it, even those who had never set foot inside the place. The city’s prostitutes took up a collection and presented Mayor Cacciari with a check for $1,500.
     
     
    The Gazzettino reported on a series of revelations about the fire that had come out in the last two days. Even for people not normally susceptible to suggestions of conspiracy, there were a number of suspicious coincidences.
     
     
    It was discovered, for example, that someone had unplugged both the smoke alarm and the heat sensor two days before the fire. This had supposedly been done because fumes and heat from the renovation work had been setting off the alarms repeatedly, annoying the workers.
     
     
    The Fenice’s sprinkler system had been dismantled before a newly installed system could be activated.
     
     
    The lone guard of the Fenice had not made an appearance at the fire until 9:20 P.M., at least twenty minutes after the first alarm had been called in. He claimed he had been wandering around inside the building, trying to find the source of the smoke.
     
     
    It had also come to light that a small fire had broken out two weeks earlier, caused by a blowtorch, possibly on purpose, but the incident had been hushed up.
     
     
    Conspiracy or no, there was ample evidence of negligence, starting with the empty canal. Mayor Cacciari had initiated a commendable and long-overdue plan to dredge and clean the city’s smaller canals. However, a year before the fire, the city’s prefect, or chief administrator, had sent the mayor a letter warning that no canal should be drained until the city had first secured an alternate source of water in case of fire. His letter had gone unanswered. Six months later, the prefect sent a second letter. The answer to that one was the fire itself.
     
     
    The dry canal was only part of the story of malfeasance and negligence. People who had been involved in the renovation of the Fenice described the work site as chaotic. Security doors had been left unlocked or even wide open; people came and went as they pleased, authorized or not; copies of the keys to the front door had been handed out