Venice the Menaced

By Richard Lacayo

Nine years ago, John Berendt had a problem, the kind you can have only when you've written one of the biggest nonfiction books of the decade. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was on its way to a record-breaking four years on the New York Times best-seller list. Savannah, Ga., where his story is set, was happily inundated with Midnight-loving tourists. Clint Eastwood was preparing the movie. Now the problem: What could Berendt do for an encore? Where was he going to find a town as wiggy as Savannah?

So every time he went on the road to promote his book, Berendt, now 65, scouted locales for the next one. He got a tip about a place in Texas that had a promising scandal attached. "It was a very spooky town," says Berendt, sitting in the living room of his handsomely renovated Manhattan town house, the sort that sales of 2.7 million hardcovers will get you. "But it was terribly small." He looked into the tale of a leper colony in Louisiana. "But that story centered on an old couple," he says. "The husband had just died, and the wife didn't remember anything."

It took a few years of those kinds of dead ends before it finally dawned on Berendt that just across the Atlantic there was another city he knew well, one that was every bit as madcap and enigmatic as Savannah, with an even longer history of intrigues. "Venice!" he says. "So I went over again. And by God, three days before I got there, Fenice burned to the ground."

Fenice (pronounced Fuh-nee-chay) was the city's great opera house, which exploded into flame on Jan. 29, 1996. The tortured inquiry into what caused the fire--negligence? scheming workmen? mafiosi?--gives Berendt one, but only one of his narrative threads in The City of Falling Angels (Penguin Press; 414 pages), the expertly fashioned successor to Midnight that arrives in stores this week. Managing somehow to insinuate himself into the life of the city at many levels, he also recounts a struggle over ownership of the last home and valuable papers of the poet Ezra Pound, the mysterious suicide of a local gay poet and a nasty split within Save Venice, a favorite charity of wealthy Americans seeking entree to the palazzi of Venetian society.

Actually, it wasn't until 2000 that Berendt, who was sidelined for a while by a heart attack in 1998, was entirely sure that Venice was the place. It took him that long to become confident that he could enter the city's famously enclosed social circles. He also knew by then that the Fenice fire was a signal moment, one that made it seem as if the city were losing its claim to being considered a living entity, not just a giant museum. "Venice had been called a dying city for 200 years," Berendt says, "ever since Napoleon laid waste to it. But now it looked as if it really was dying. In the 19th century it had a dozen opera houses. Now it did not have one. It didn't even have a major stage for performing artists."

Then again, maybe it didn't need one. In Angels, half the citizens of Venice seem to be acting out roles of one sort or another all day. Berendt's Venice is Savannah with gondolas, a world-class center of civic shenanigans, full of hidden agendas and local rivalries, where any ordinary conversation might be a web of stratagems. As in Midnight, Berendt is not just an urbane guide to a city's secrets. He's also a state-of-the-art weirdo magnet. His book is populated with characters like the wealthy American expatriate who has turned his portion of the family palace into the "Earth liaison station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars." There's also the enlightening Rat Man of Treviso, who makes rat poisons customized to suit the appetite of rodents in different culinary zones. He adds pork fat in Germany, popcorn and granola in the U.S. "Rats are better fed than ever," he explains to Berendt. "Because there's more garbage than ever. So they've become very choosy about what they eat."

While he was researching and writing this book, Berendt visited Venice repeatedly, living in a rented apartment and always traveling with a notebook and tape recorder. Angels opens with a note to readers promising that "all the people in it are real" and that "there are no composite characters." He's still sensitive about the controversy that broke out when it emerged that in Midnight he had invented dialogue, fabricated scenes and changed chronologies--fiddling that moved the Pulitzer Prize jury, which was considering Midnight for the award, to rule it out. For this book, he says, to re-create scenes he did not witness, he interviewed all the participants. Some conversations are placed in new settings, but none, he insists, were invented. "I did a lot of research," he says. "You see just the tip of the iceberg." And anyway, in a city as fantastical as Venice, who needs make-believe?