Excerpt: 'City of Falling Angels' by John Berendt

Sept. 28, 2005 — -- In his first book, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," John Berendt brought readers into the beauty and eccentricities of Savannah, Ga. Eleven years after that book hit The New York Times best-seller list, Berendt delves into the complicated world of Venice, Italy.

"The City of Falling Angels" begins with Berendt's investigation into the fire that destroyed Venice's famed opera house, the Fenice. By the time the Fenice is rebuilt and reopened, Berendt has created an intricate picture of modern Venice.

You can read an excerpt from "The City of Falling Angels" below.

Chapter One: An Evening in Venice

The air still smelled of charcoal when I arrived inVenice three days after the fire. As it happened, the timing ofmy visit was purely coincidental. I had made plans, months before,to come to Venice for a few weeks in the off-season in order to enjoythe city without the crush of other tourists.

"If there had been a wind Monday night," the water-taxi drivertold me as we came across the lagoon from the airport, "therewouldn't be a Venice to come to."

"How did it happen?" I asked.

The taxi driver shrugged. "How do all these things happen?"

It was early February, in the middle of the peaceful lull that settlesover Venice every year between New Year's Day and Carnival.

The tourists had gone, and in their absence the Venice they inhabitedhad all but closed down. Hotel lobbies and souvenir shops stoodvirtually empty. Gondolas lay tethered to poles and covered in bluetarpaulin. Unbought copies of the International Herald Tribune remainedon newsstand racks all day, and pigeons abandoned sparsepickings in St. Mark's Square to scavenge for crumbs in other partsof the city.

Meanwhile the other Venice, the one inhabited by Venetians, wasas busy as ever--the neighborhood shops, the vegetable stands, thefish markets, the wine bars. For these few weeks, Venetians couldstride through their city without having to squeeze past dense clustersof slow-moving tourists. The city breathed, its pulse quickened.Venetians had Venice all to themselves.

But the atmosphere was subdued. People spoke in hushed, dazedtones of the sort one hears when there has been a sudden death in thefamily. The subject was on everyone's lips. Within days I had heardabout it in such detail I felt as if I had been there myself.

It happened on Monday evening, January 29, 1996.

Shortly before nine o'clock, Archimede Seguso sat down at thedinner table and unfolded his napkin. Before joining him, his wifewent into the living room to lower the curtains, which was her longstandingevening ritual. Signora Seguso knew very well that no onecould see in through the windows, but it was her way of enfoldingher family in a domestic embrace. The Segusos lived on the thirdfloor of Ca' Capello, a sixteenth-century house in the heart ofVenice. A narrow canal wrapped around two sides of the buildingbefore flowing into the Grand Canal a short distance away.Signor Seguso waited patiently at the table. He was eightysix--tall, thin, his posture still erect. A fringe of wispy white hair andflaring eyebrows gave him the look of a kindly sorcerer, full of wonderand surprise. He had an animated face and sparkling eyes thatcaptivated everyone who met him. If you happened to be in his presencefor any length of time, however, your eye would eventually bedrawn to his hands.

They were large, muscular hands, the hands of an artisan whosework demanded physical strength. For seventy-five years, SignorSeguso had stood in front of a blazing-hot glassworks furnace--ten, twelve, eighteen hours a day--holding a heavy steel pipe in hishands, turning it to prevent the dollop of molten glass at the otherend from drooping to one side or the other, pausing to blow into itto inflate the glass, then laying it across his workbench, still turningit with his left hand while, with a pair of tongs in his right hand,pulling, pinching, and coaxing the glass into the shape of gracefulvases, bowls, and goblets.

After all those years of turning the steel pipe hour after hour,Signor Seguso's left hand had molded itself around the pipe until itbecame permanently cupped, as if the pipe were always in it. Hiscupped hand was the proud mark of his craft, and this was why theartist who painted his portrait some years ago had taken particularcare to show the curve in his left hand.

Men in the Seguso family had been glassmakers since the fourteenthcentury. Archimede was the twenty-first generation and oneof the greatest of them all. He could sculpt heavy pieces out of solidglass and blow vases so thin and fragile they could barely be touched.He was the first glassmaker ever to see his work honored with an exhibitionin the Doge 's Palace in St. Mark's Square. Tiffany sold hispieces in its Fifth Avenue store.

Archimede Seguso had been making glass since the age ofeleven, and by the time he was twenty, he had earned the nickname"Mago del Fuoco" (Wizard of Fire). He no longer had the staminato stand in front of a hot and howling furnace eighteen hours a day,but he worked every day nonetheless, and with undiminished pleasure.On this particular day, in fact, he had risen at his usual hour of4:30 A.M., convinced as always that the pieces he was about to makewould be more beautiful than any he had ever made before.

In the living room, Signora Seguso paused to look out the windowbefore lowering the curtain. She noticed that the air had becomehazy, and she mused aloud that a winter fog had set in. Inresponse, Signor Seguso remarked from the other room that it musthave come in very quickly, because he had seen the quarter moon ina clear sky only a few minutes before.

The living room window looked across a small canal at the backof the Fenice Opera House, thirty feet away. Rising above it in thedistance, some one hundred yards away, the theater's grand entrancewing appeared to be shrouded in mist. Just as she started to lower thecurtain, Signora Seguso saw a flash. She thought it was lightning.Then she saw another flash, and this time she knew it was fire.

"Papa!" she cried out. "The Fenice is on fire!"

Signor Seguso came quickly to the window. More flames flickeredat the front of the theater, illuminating what Signora Seguso hadthought was mist but had in fact been smoke. She rushed to the telephoneand dialed 115 for the fire brigade. Signor Seguso went intohis bedroom and stood at the corner window, which was even closerto the Fenice than the living room window.

Between the fire and the Segusos' house lay a jumble of buildingsthat constituted the Fenice. The part on fire was farthest away,the chaste neoclassical entrance wing with its formal receptionrooms, known collectively as the Apollonian rooms. Then came themain body of the theater with its elaborately rococo auditorium, andfinally the vast backstage area. Flaring out from both sides of the auditoriumand the backstage were clusters of smaller, interconnected buildings like the one that housed the scenery workshop immediatelyacross the narrow canal from Signor Seguso.

Signora Seguso could not get through to the fire brigade, so shedialed 112 for the police.

The enormity of what was happening outside his windowstunned Signor Seguso. The Gran Teatro La Fenice was one of thesplendors of Venice; it was arguably the most beautiful opera housein the world, and one of the most significant. The Fenice had commissioneddozens of operas that had premiered on its stage--Verdi'sLa Traviata and Rigoletto, Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress,Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw. For two hundred years, audienceshad delighted in the sumptuous clarity of the Fenice 'sacoustics, the magnificence of its five tiers of gilt-encrusted boxes,and the baroque fantasy of it all. Signor and Signora Seguso had alwaystaken a box for the season, and over the years they had beengiven increasingly desirable locations until they finally found themselvesnext to the royal box.

Signora Seguso had no luck getting through to the police either,and now she was becoming frantic. She called upstairs to the apartmentwhere her son Gino lived with his wife and their son, Antonio.Gino was still out at the Seguso glass factory in Murano. Antonio wasvisiting a friend near the Rialto.

Signor Seguso stood silently at his bedroom window, watchingas the flames raced across the entire top floor of the entrance wing.He knew that, for all its storied loveliness, the Fenice was at this momentan enormous pile of exquisite kindling. Inside a thick shell ofIstrian stone lined with brick, the structure was made entirely ofwood--wooden beams, wooden floors, wooden walls--richly embellishedwith wood carvings, sculpted stucco, and papier-mâché, allof it covered with layer upon layer of lacquer and gilt. Signor Segusowas aware, too, that the scenery workshop just across the canalfrom his house was stocked with solvents and, most worrisome of all,cylinders of propane gas that were used for welding and soldering.Signora Seguso came back into the room to say she had finallyspoken with the police.

"They already knew about the fire," she said. "They told me weshould leave the house at once." She looked over her husband'sshoulder and stifled a scream; the flames had moved closer in theshort time she had been away from the window. They were now advancingthrough the four smaller reception halls toward the mainbody of the theater, in their direction.

Archimede Seguso stared into the fire with an appraising eye. Heopened the window, and a gust of bitter-cold air rushed in. The windwas blowing to the southwest. The Segusos were due west of the theater,however, and Signor Seguso calculated that if the wind did notchange direction or pick up strength, the fire would advance towardthe other side of the Fenice rather than in their direction.

"Now, Nandina," he said softly, "stay calm. We 're not in anydanger."

The Segusos' house was only one of many buildings close to theFenice. Except for Campo San Fantin, a small plaza at the front of thetheater, the Fenice was hemmed in by old and equally flammablebuildings, many of them attached to it or separated from it by onlyfour or five feet. This was not at all unusual in Venice, where buildingspace had always been at a premium. Seen from above, Veniceresembled a jigsaw puzzle of terra-cotta rooftops. Passages betweensome of the buildings were so narrow one could not walk throughthem with an open umbrella. It had become a specialty of Venetianburglars to escape from the scene of a crime by leaping from roof toroof. If the fire in the Fenice were able to make the same sort ofleap, it would almost certainly destroy a sizable swath of Venice.The Fenice itself was dark. It had been closed five months forrenovations and was due to reopen in a month. The canal along itsrear façade was also closed -- empty -- having been sealed off anddrained so work crews could dredge the silt and sludge from it andrepair its walls for the first time in forty years. The canal betweenthe Segusos' building and the back of the Fenice was now a deep,muddy gulch with a tangle of exposed pipes and a few pieces ofheavy machinery sitting in puddles at the bottom. The empty canalwould make it impossible for fireboats to reach the Fenice, and,worse than that, it would deprive them of a source of water. Venetianfiremen depended on water pumped directly from the canals toput out fires. The city had no system of fire hydrants.

THE FENICE WAS NOW RINGED BY A TUMULT OF SHOUTSand running footsteps. Tenants, routed from their houses by the police,crossed paths with patrons coming out of the Ristorante AnticoMartini. A dozen bewildered guests rolled suitcases out of the HotelLa Fenice, asking directions to the Hotel Saturnia, where they hadbeen told to go. Into their midst, a wild-eyed woman wearing onlya nightgown came stumbling from her house into Campo San Fantinscreaming hysterically. She threw herself to the ground in frontof the theater, flailing her arms and rolling on the pavement. Severalwaiters came out of the Antico Martini and led her inside.Two fireboats managed to navigate to a water-filled canal a shortdistance from the Fenice. Their hoses were not long enough to reacharound the intervening buildings, however, so the firemen draggedthem through the kitchen window at the back of the Antico Martiniand out through the dining room into Campo San Fantin. Theyaimed their nozzles at flames burning furiously in a top-floor windowof the theater, but the water pressure was too low. The arc ofwater barely reached the windowsill. The fire went on leaping andtaunting and sucking up great turbulent currents of air that set theflames snapping like brilliant red sails in a violent wind.Several policemen struggled with the massive front door of theFenice, but to no avail. One of them drew his pistol and fired threeshots at the lock. The door opened. Two firemen rushed in and disappearedinto a dense white wall of smoke. Moments later they camerunning out. "It's too late," said one. "It's burning like straw."

The wail of sirens now filled the air as police and firemen racedup and down the Grand Canal in motorboats, spanking up hugebutterfly wings of spray as they bounced through the wakes ofother boats. About an hour after the first alarm, the city's big firelaunch pulled up at the landing stage behind Haig's Bar. Its highpoweredrigs would at last be able to pump water the two hundredyards from the Grand Canal to the Fenice. Dozens of firemen ranhoses from the fire launch into Campo Santa Maria del Giglio,feverishly coupling sections together, but it was immediately apparentthat the hoses were of different gauges. Leaks sprayed fromthe couplings, but the firemen carried the linked hoses, such as theywere, up to the rooftops around the Fenice anyway. They directedhalf the water onto the theater in an attempt to contain the fire andthe rest of it onto adjacent buildings. Fire Commandant Alfio Pinihad already made a momentous strategic decision: The Fenice waslost; save the city.

When the lights went out, Count Girolamo Marcello wasmidsentence in a conversation over dinner with his son on the topfloor of his palace less than a minute's walk from the front of theFenice. Earlier in the day, Count Marcello had learned that the exiledRussian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky had died suddenlyof a heart attack, at fifty-five, in New York. Brodsky hadbeen a passionate lover of Venice and a friend and houseguest ofMarcello's. It was while he was staying in Marcello's palace, in fact,that Brodsky had written his last book, Watermark, a lyrical reflectionon Venice. That afternoon Marcello had spoken by phonewith Brodsky's widow, Maria, and they had discussed the possibilityof burying Brodsky in Venice. Marcello knew that this wouldnot be easily arranged. Every available plot on the burial island ofSan Michele had been spoken for years ago. It was generally understoodthat any new arrival, even a native Venetian, would bedug up in ten years and moved to a common burial site farther outin the lagoon. But for a non-Venetian, Jewish atheist, gaining approvalfor even a temporary burial would be a quest fraught withobstacles. Still, there had been notable exceptions. Igor Stravinskyhad been buried on San Michele, and so had Sergei Diaghilev andEzra Pound. They had all been buried in the Anglican and GreekOrthodox section, and all would be allowed to remain there inperpetuity. So there was reason to hope that Brodsky could beburied there, too, and this was on Marcello's mind when the lightswent out.

Father and son sat in darkness for a while, expecting the lightsto come back on. Then they heard the sirens, lots of them, manymore than usual.

"Let's go up and see what's happened," said Marcello. Theyheaded upstairs to the wooden deck on the roof, the altana, and assoon as they opened the door, they saw the raging fire.

Marcello decided they should leave the house at once. They descendedthe stairs, feeling their way in the darkness, Marcello wonderingif the six-hundred-year-old palace was doomed. If it was, themost impressive private library in Venice would disappear with it.Marcello's library occupied most of the second floor. It was an architecturaldelight, a high-ceilinged space complete with a wraparound wooden gallery that could be reached only by climbing a secretstairway hidden behind a panel in the wall. The floor-to-ceilingshelves held forty thousand volumes of private and state papers,some of them more than a thousand years old. The collectionamounted to a treasure trove of Venetian history, and Marcello regularlymade it available to scholars. He himself spent long hours sittingin a thronelike black leather armchair perusing the archives,especially the papers of the Marcello family, which was one of theoldest in Venice. Marcello's ancestors included a fifteenth-centurydoge, or head of state. The Marcellos had, in fact, been among thefamilies that built the Fenice and owned it until just before WorldWar II, when the municipality of Venice took it over.

Marcello walked to the edge of Campo San Fantin and foundhimself standing in the midst of a crowd that included the entirecity council, which had rushed in a body from Ca' Farsetti, the townhall, where it had been in an evening session. Marcello was a familiarfigure around town, with his bald head and close-cropped graybeard. The press frequently sought him out for comment, knowingthey could count on a frank, often provocative quote or two. He hadonce described himself to an interviewer as "inquisitive, restless,eclectic, impulsive and capricious." It was the last two of these behavioralquirks that asserted themselves as he stood in Campo SanFantin looking at the burning opera house.

"What a shame," he said. "It's gone. I suppose I will never seeit again. The reconstruction will take so long, I'm sure I won't bealive when it's finished." This remark was nominally directed to theperson next to him, but it was really intended for the ears of a handsomeman with a dark beard in his mid-fifties who was standing a fewfeet away: the mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari. Mayor Cacciariwas a former Communist, a professor of philosophy and architectureat the University of Venice, and Italy's most highly regardedcontemporary philosopher. Being mayor automatically made himpresident of the Fenice, which meant he had been responsible for thesecurity of the theater and would now be in charge of rebuilding it.Marcello's remark clearly implied that, in his opinion, neither Cacciarinor his left-wing government had the competence to do it.Mayor Cacciari gazed at the fire with a look of deep despair, unfazedone way or the other by Marcello's obliquely worded taunt."But I would suggest," Marcello went on, "that if they want torebuild the place as it was in its prime -- and by that I mean as a socialplace, a meeting place -- they should make it into a great discothequefor young people."

An old man standing in front of Marcello turned around, aghast,tears rolling down his cheeks. "Girolamo!" he said. "How can yousay such a thing? Anyway, who knows what the hell young peoplewill want five years from now?"

A deafening crash resounded in the depths of the Fenice. Thegreat crystal chandelier had fallen to the floor.

"You have a point," Marcello replied, "but, as everybody knows,going to the opera has always been a social thing. You can even seeit in the architecture. Only a third of the seats are positioned so theyhave a good view of the stage. The rest, particularly the boxes, arereally best for looking at the audience. The arrangement is purelysocial."

Marcello spoke with a gentle bemusement and without any traceof cynicism. It seemed to tickle him that anyone could think that generationsof operagoers, like the Marcellos, had been drawn to theopera by anything as lofty as music or culture. Benedetto Marcello,the eighteenth-century composer and one of Girolamo Marcello'sforebears, notwithstanding. Throughout its existence, the Fenicehad been hallowed ground in the social landscape of Venice, andGirolamo Marcello had a broad knowledge of Venetian social history. He was, in fact, regarded as something of an authority on thesubject.

"In the old days," he said, "the private boxes had curtains youcould close, even during the performance. My grandfather lovedgoing to the opera, but he didn't give a damn about music. He wouldopen the curtains only for highlights on the stage. He would say, 'Silence!Now we have the aria!' and he would pull open the curtainsand applaud . . . 'Good! Lovely! Well done!' Then he would close thecurtains again, and a servant would come from the house with a basketof chicken and some wine. Opera was just a form of relaxation,and anyway it was cheaper to take a box at the opera than heat awhole palace for an evening."

Suddenly another enormous boom shook the ground. The floorsin the entrance wing had collapsed, one onto another. People standingat the edge of the campo leaped backward just as the roof of theentrance wing fell, sending flames and burning debris high into theair. Marcello went back upstairs to his rooftop altana, this time fortifiedwith a bottle of grappa, a video camera, and a bucket of waterin case any of the airborne embers should happen to land on his roof.

Within minutes, as Girolamo Marcello's video camera whirredand clicked, as Archimede Seguso stared in silence from his bedroomwindow, as hundreds of Venetians watched from rooftops, andas thousands more all over Italy followed live television coverage ofthe fire -- the roof of the auditorium collapsed with a thunderousboom and a volcanic eruption that shot flaming debris feet intothe air. A powerful updraft sent chunks of burning embers, some asbig as shoe boxes, arcing over Venice like comets.Shortly after eleven, a helicopter appeared above St. Mark's,swung low over the mouth of Grand Canal, and scooped up a tankfulof water. Then it soared aloft again, banked over the Fenice and,to cheers from rooftops, dropped its water. A hissing plume of steamand smoke coiled up from the Fenice, but the fire kept burning undiminished.The helicopter turned and flew back to the Grand Canalto load up again.

It suddenly occurred to Girolamo Marcello that his wife, Lesa,who was out of town, might hear about the fire before he had achance to tell her that her family and her house were safe. He camedown from the roof to telephone her.

Countess Marcello worked for Save Venice, the American nonprofitorganization devoted to raising money for restoring Venetianart and architecture. Save Venice was headquartered in New York.Lesa Marcello was the director of its Venice office. Over the pastthirty years, Save Venice had restored scores of paintings, frescoes,mosaics, statues, ceilings, and building façades. Recently, Save Venicehad restored the Fenice 's painted curtain, at a cost of $100,000.

Save Venice had become a hugely popular charity in America,largely because it was set up to be, in a sense, a participatory charity.Save Venice would organize event-filled, four-day galas in Venicein late summer during which, for three thousand dollars a person,subscribers could attend elegant lunches, dinners, and balls in privatevillas and palaces not open to the public.

In winter Save Venice kept the spirit alive by mounting a fundraisingball in New York. Lesa Marcello had flown to New York earlierin the week to attend the winter ball. This year it was to be amasked ball, based on the theme of Carnival, and it would be heldin the Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center.As he picked up the telephone to call his wife, Girolamo Marcellosuddenly remembered that the ball was scheduled for this very night.

The towers of Manhattan glittered in the late afternoonsun as Lesa Marcello made her way to the telephonethrough a confusion of people rushing to finish decorating the RainbowRoom. The interior designer John Saladino was fuming. Theunions had allowed him only three hours to install his decorations,so he had been forced to deploy the entire domestic staff of histwenty-three-room house in Connecticut, plus twelve people fromhis office. He intended to transform the Rainbow Room's art decoballroom into his version of the Venetian Lagoon by nightfall.

"The Rainbow Room is dominated by a cabal of union-clad people,"he said, loud enough to be overheard by some of those verypeople. "Their role in life is to make everyone around them miserable."

He glared at a foursome of slow-moving electricians.

"I'm decorating eighty-eight tables so that each one will represent an islandin the lagoon. Over each table we 're suspending a cluster of silver,helium-filled balloons that will reflect candlelight from the tablebelow, creating the effect of a glowing baldacchino." Mr. Saladinolooked around imperiously. "I wonder if anyone within the sound ofmy voice knows what a baldacchino is?" He was clearly not expectingan answer from any of the people inflating balloons or makingcenterpieces, or from the technicians loudly testing sound levels onPeter Duchin's bandstand, or from the two jugglers rehearsing theiract, clomping around on stilts, tossing balls in the air and spinningplates on the ends of their fingers.

"A baldacchino!" said a barrel-chested man standing in front ofan easel by the bandstand. He had long white hair, an aquiline nose,and a silk scarf hanging loosely around his neck. "A baldacchino isour word for 'canopy,' " he said. Then he shrugged and went backto setting up his easel.

This was Ludovico De Luigi, one of the best-known contemporaryVenetian artists. He had been brought to New York by SaveVenice to help raise money at the ball tonight. In the course of theevening, he would execute a watercolor that would later be auctionedoff for the benefit of Save Venice.

Ludovico De Luigi was a man of supreme self-confidence anddramatic flair. His futuristic, Dalíesque paintings tended toward themetaphysical-surreal. Typically they were spectral landscapes of familiarVenetian buildings in stunning juxtapositions -- the domedSanta Maria della Salute Church as an oil rig in the middle of anocean or St. Mark's Square as a body of water with a huge Polarissubmarine surfacing and plowing ominously toward the basilica.Though verging on kitsch, De Luigi's works were technically brilliantand always eye-catching.

In Venice he was known as much for his public antics as for hisart. On one occasion, he had been granted permission to display hissculpture of a horse in St. Mark's Square, and without telling the authorities,he invited a notorious member of the Italian parliament toattend: Ilona Staller, a Radical deputy from Rome, better known tofans of her porn movies as "Cicciolina." She arrived at St. Mark's bygondola, topless, and climbed up onto the horse, proclaiming herselfa living work of art surmounting an inanimate one. Parliamentaryimmunity protected Cicciolina from prosecution for obscene acts inpublic, so De Luigi was charged instead. He told the presiding judge,who happened to be a woman, that he had not expected Cicciolinato take her clothes off.

"But, knowing Miss Staller's history, Signor De Luigi," the judgesaid, "couldn't you imagine she would take her clothes off?""Your Honor, I am an artist. I have a lively imagination. I canimagine you taking your clothes off right here in court. But I don'texpect you to do it."

"Signor De Luigi," said the judge, "I, too, have an imagination,and I can imagine sending you to jail for five years for contempt ofcourt." In the end, she gave him a sentence of five months in jail,which was vacated in a general amnesty a short time later. In anycase, tonight in the Rainbow Room, Ludovico De Luigi was goingto paint a picture of the Miracoli Church as a tribute to Save Venice'scurrent, and most ambitious, restoration project. As he went back tomixing colors on his palette, Lesa Marcello picked up the telephoneand turned toward the windows and the view of Manhattan.

Countess Marcello was a dark-haired woman with a quiet mannerand an expression of infinite patience. She pressed her free handagainst her ear to shut out the noise and heard Girolamo Marcello saythat the Fenice had caught fire and was burning out of control. "It'sgone," he said. "There is nothing anybody can do. But at least we areall safe, and so far the fire has not spread."

Lesa sank into a chair by the window, dazed. Tears welled in hereyes as she tried to absorb the news. For generations, her family hadplayed a prominent role in the affairs of Venice. Her grandfather hadbeen mayor between the wars. She gazed blankly out the window.The setting sun cast shimmering red-and-orange reflections on theglass skyscrapers of Wall Street, creating an effect that made it look,to her eyes, as though the city were on fire. She turned away.

"God, no!" Bea Guthrie gasped when Lesa told her about theFenice. Mrs. Guthrie was the executive director of Save Venice. Sheput down the centerpiece she had been working on as a look of paniccrossed her face. In an instant, the masked ball had been reduced toa horribly inappropriate frivolity, and it was too late to cancel it. Sixhundred costumed merrymakers would be arriving at the RainbowRoom in a matter of hours, dressed as gondoliers, popes, doges,courtesans, Marco Polos, Shylocks, Casanovas, and Tadzios, andthere was nothing anybody could do to head them off. The guest ofhonor, Signora Lamberto Dini, the wife of Italy's prime minister,would certainly have to bow out, and that would only emphasize theinappropriateness of the ball. Clearly the party would turn into awake. Something had to be done. But what?

Bea Guthrie called her husband, Bob Guthrie, who was presidentof Save Venice and chief of reconstructive and plastic surgery atNew York Downtown Hospital. Dr. Guthrie was in the operatingroom. She then called Larry Lovett, the chairman of Save Venice.Lovett had been chairman of both the Metropolitan Opera Guild andthe Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In recent years, hehad bought a palace on the Grand Canal and made it his principalresidence. He reacted to the news with as much anger as sadness.Whatever the cause had been, he was certain that negligence hadbeen a contributing factor, knowing the way things worked inVenice. Dr. Guthrie heard the news as he was coming out of the operatingroom. His shock was tempered by a dash of pragmatism."Well," he said, "there goes the curtain we just restored for a hundredthousand dollars."

Neither Larry Lovett nor Bob Guthrie could suggest any quickfix for the party. It would simply have to go on as planned. For onefleeting moment, they all wondered whether it might be possible tosay nothing about the fire, assuming that only a few people wouldhave heard about it before coming to the ball. But that, they decided,might only make matters worse.

Bea Guthrie returned her attention to her unfinished centerpieceas a smiling, ruddy-faced man with dark, curly hair came walkinginto the Rainbow Room and waved to her. He was Emilio Paties, aVenetian restaurateur who had also been flown to New York by SaveVenice to cook dinner for six hundred people tonight. He was justnow pacing off the distance from the stoves on the sixty-fourth floorto the tables here on the sixty-fifth. As he walked, he kept looking athis watch. His main concern was the white truffle and porcini mushroomrisotto.

"The final two minutes of cooking happen after you take therisotto off the fire," he was saying to the headwaiter walking besidehim. "When it comes off the stove, it is absorbing water very quickly,and in exactly two minutes it will be done. It must be served on theplate immediately, or it will turn to mush! We have two minutes toget it from the stoves downstairs to the plates up here. Two minutes.No more!" When Signor Paties reached the far side of the room, helooked at his watch and then looked back at Bea Guthrie, beaming."One minute and forty-five seconds! Va bene! Good!"

Later in the afternoon, when the decorations were finished, BeaGuthrie went home to change, depressed, dreading the next severalhours. But then the guest of honor, Signora Dini, called with anidea. "I think I know what we can do," she said, "if it meets with yourapproval. I will come to the ball tonight. After the guests have arrivedand the announcement is made about the fire, I will say, speaking forall Italians, that we are very grateful that this afternoon the board ofdirectors of Save Venice agreed that all the money raised tonightwill be dedicated to rebuilding the Fenice."

That would put a positive spin on the evening. The Save Veniceboard could be canvassed quickly, and they would surely agree. Suddenlyfeeling much better, Mrs. Guthrie went upstairs and laid outher harlequin costume in preparation for the ball.

Signora Seguso nearly wept for joy when her son, Gino,and her grandson, Antonio, returned home. The moment the electricityhad gone off, the flickering light from the fire had invaded thehouse, its reflection dancing and leaping over the walls and furniture,making it seem as if the house itself had caught fire. The Segusos'telephone had been ringing constantly, friends wanting to know ifthey were all right. Some had even come to the door with fire extinguishers.Gino and Antonio were downstairs talking with the firemen,who were urging the Segusos to evacuate, as others in theneighborhood had already done. The officers spoke in loweredvoices and with considerably more deference than usual, becausethey were aware that the old man at the window upstairs was thegreat Archimede Seguso.

And Archimede Seguso would not leave the house.Nor would any of the Segusos consider leaving while he was stillin it. So Gino and Antonio busied themselves moving furniture awayfrom the windows, taking down curtains, rolling up rugs, and movingflower boxes indoors. Antonio went upstairs to the terrace, rippedthe awning off its rod, and sprayed water on the roof tiles, which hadbecome so hot that steam rose up from them. Signora Seguso and herdaughter-in-law meanwhile put things into suitcases in order to beready to flee the moment Archimede changed his mind. Gino, noticinghis wife 's suitcase in the hall, lifted the lid to see what valuablesshe had put in it. It was filled with family photographs still in theirframes.

"We can replace everything else," she said, "but not the memories."Gino kissed her.

Suddenly, there was another earth-shaking boom. The roof overthe backstage had fallen in.

A fire captain came up the stairs and told the Segusos, almostapologetically, that his men would have to run a hose through theirliving room to a window facing the Fenice, just in case the firebreached the wall across the canal. But first the firemen cleared a pathfor the hose. With care verging on reverence, they moved ArchimedeSeguso's works of art in glass -- the abstract, modernist pieces hehad made in the 1920s and 1930s when most other Venetian glassmakers were still turning out flowery, eighteenth-century designs.

When they laid down the fire hose, it was flanked by an honor guardof glass objects touched by Seguso's genius -- bowls and vases embeddedwith fine threads of colored glass resembling lace, or withundulating ribbons of color, or with tiny bubbles suspended in rowsand spirals. There were remarkable solid sculptures of people and animalsmade from single masses of molten glass, a seemingly impossiblefeat that he alone had mastered.

Gino came to his father's bedroom door accompanied by the firecaptain. The captain, rather than presuming to address the old mandirectly, turned to Gino and said, "We are very concerned for themaestro's safety."

Signor Seguso continued to stare out the window in silence.

"Papa," said Gino in a gently pleading voice, "the fire is gettingcloser. I think we should leave."

Gino's father kept his eye on the Fenice, watching as bursts ofgreen, purple, umber, and blue flames punctuated the fire. He couldsee the flames through the slits in the louvered shutters at the backof the Fenice, and he saw their reflections on the rippling puddles atthe bottom of the canal. He saw great, long tongues of fire lickingout through windows and geysers of glowing ash soaring throughholes in the roof. The winter air outside the bedroom window hadturned blazing hot. The Fenice had become a furnace.

"I'm staying here," Archimede Seguso said quietly.

In conversations at Haig's bar, certain words kept comingup again and again, words that seemed to have nothing to do withthe Fenice or with each other: Bari... Petruzzelli... San Giovanniin Laterno... Uffizi... Milano... Palermo. But there was anotherword, also frequently overheard, that tied them all together: Mafia.

The mob had recently been engaged in arson and bombings.The most unsettling incident, in view of what was happening tonightat the Fenice, was the 1991 fire that destroyed the Petruzzelli OperaHouse in Bari. It was subsequently discovered that the Mafia boss inBari had ordered the fire after bribing the manager to award him lucrativecontracts for the reconstruction. More than a few peoplewatching the Fenice fire believed that this was a replay. The Mafiawas also suspected in the deadly car-bomb attacks that had destroyedparts of the Church of San Giovanni in Laterno in Rome, the UffiziGallery in Florence, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan. Thebombings had been interpreted as a warning to Pope John Paul II forhis frequent anti-Mafia statements and to the Italian government forits aggressive judicial crackdown on the mob. Even now, in Mestreon the mainland shore of the Venetian Lagoon, a Sicilian don wasbeing tried for the car-bomb murder of a tough anti-Mafia judge, hiswife, and bodyguards in Palermo. The fire at the Fenice could be aheavy-handed warning to stop the trial.

"The Mafia!" Girolamo Marcello exclaimed, speaking to friendswho had joined him on his altana. "If they did set the fire, theycould have saved themselves the trouble. The Fenice would haveburned without any help from them. It's been chaos over there formonths.

"Just after the renovation work started," Marcello went on, "thesuperintendent of the Fenice asked me to come and see him. SaveVenice had just restored the Fenice's curtain, and now he wanted me,as a member of the Save Venice board, to ask Save Venice to restorethe frescoes of Dante's Divine Comedy in the bar. The superintendentinvited me to come and look at the frescoes, and I couldn't believewhat I saw. The place was madness. Everywhere you looked,there were flammable materials. I don't know how many cans ofvarnish, turpentine, and solvents there were open, closed, spilledon the floor, lengths of wooden parquet in stacks, rolls of plasticcarpeting piled high, heaps of rubbish everywhere. In the midst ofall this, men were working with blowtorches! Can you imagine! Solderingirons! And surveillance? Zero, as usual. Responsibility? Zero.I thought, 'They're mad!' So if the Mafia wanted the Fenice to burn,all they had to do was wait."

By 2:00 A.M., even though the fire was still officially out of control,Archimede Seguso could see that an equilibrium had beenreached between the flames and the firemen. He appeared in thedoorway of his bedroom, the first time he had come away from thewindow in four hours.

"We 're out of danger now," he said. He kissed his wife. "I toldyou not to worry, Nandina." Then he embraced his son, hisdaughter-in-law, and his grandson. With that, and without saying anotherword, he went to bed.

As Signor Seguso fell asleep, a parade of Prussian generals,court jesters, and fairy princesses began stepping out of elevatorsinto the candlelit Rainbow Room in New York. A bishop in fullregalia handed a drink to a belly dancer. A hooded executionerchatted with Marie Antoinette. A cluster of people had gatheredaround the painter Ludovico De Luigi, who had sketched the outlinesof the Miracoli Church and was beginning to apply colors toits inlaid-marble façade. The hired entertainers -- stilt-walking jugglers,acrobats, fire-eaters, and mimes in commedia dell'artecostumes -- strolled among the guests, most of whom had no idea theFenice was on fire. The only coverage of it on American televisionso far had been an eleven-second mention, without pictures, on theCBS Evening News.

Peter Duchin sat at the piano, perched like an exotic bird withblack-and-white feathers rising from the brow of his black mask.When he saw Bob Guthrie come to the microphone, he cut off themusic with a wave of his hand.

Guthrie, his large frame wrapped in a red-and-white caftan, welcomedthe guests and then told them he hated to be the bearer of badnews. "The Fenice is burning," he said. "It cannot be saved." A collectivegasp and cries of "No!" resounded throughout the ballroom.

Then the room fell silent. Guthrie introduced the guest of honor,Signora Dini, who stepped up to the microphone with tears rollingdown her cheeks. In a tremulous voice, she thanked the board ofSave Venice, which, she said, had voted late that afternoon to dedicatethe evening to raising money to rebuild the Fenice. The silencewas broken by scattered applause; the applause swelled to an ovation,and the ovation crested on a burst of cheers and whistles.

Ludovico De Luigi, his face ashen, took the Miracoli painting offthe easel and put a blank canvas in its place. In pencil he quicklysketched the Fenice. He put it in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon,for ironic effect, and engulfed it in flames.

Several people headed for the elevators to go home and changeinto traditional evening clothes, saying they were no longer in themood to be in costume. Signora Dini turned away from the microphoneand daubed her eyes with a handkerchief. Bob Guthrie stoodnearby, speaking to a cluster of people a few feet from the still-openmicrophone, which picked up part of his conversation. "We'll probablyraise close to a million dollars for the Fenice tonight," he said,citing the thousand-dollar price of admission, the auction of LudovicoDe Luigi's painting, and spontaneous donations. In answerto a question about the money, Guthrie could be heard to say, "No,no! Certainly not. We won't hand the money over to Venice until therestoration starts. Are you kidding? We 're not that stupid. We 'llkeep it in escrow till then. Otherwise, there's no telling whose pocketit might end up in."

By 3:00 A.M., the fire was finally declared under control. There had been no secondary fires, despite the flying debris,and no one had been seriously hurt. The Fenice 's thick walls hadcontained the blaze, preventing the fire from spreading, while incineratingeverything inside. Instead of destroying Venice, theFenice had, in a sense, committed suicide.

At 4:00 A.M., the helicopter made its last overhead pass. TheFenice 's sad fate was written in the leaky hoses snaking throughCampo Santa Maria del Giglio from the Grand Canal to the Fenice.Mayor Massimo Cacciari was still standing in Campo San Fantinin front of the Fenice, looking glumly at what was left of theopera house. A perfectly preserved poster, enclosed in a glass casemounted on a wall by the entrance, announced that a Woody Allenjazz concert would reopen the renovated opera house at the end ofthe month.

At 5:00 A.M., Archimede Seguso opened his eyes and sat up inbed, refreshed despite having slept only three hours. He went to thewindow and opened the shutters. The firemen had set up floodlightsand trained their hoses on the gutted interior. Billowing smoke rosefrom the Fenice's shell.

Signor Seguso dressed by the light reflected from the Fenice'sfloodlit walls. The air was thick with the smell of charred wood, buthe could smell the coffee his wife was brewing for him. As always,she was standing by the door waiting for him with a steaming cup,and, as always, he stood there with her and drank it. Then he kissedher on both cheeks, put his gray fedora on his head, and went downstairs.He paused for a moment in front of the house, looking up atthe Fenice. The windows were gaping holes framing a view of thedark, predawn sky. A strong wind whipped around the dismal shell.It was a cold wind from the north, a bora. If it had been blowing eighthours earlier, the fire would certainly have spread.

A young fireman was leaning against the wall, exhausted. Henodded as Signor Seguso approached.

"We lost it," the fireman said.

"You did all you could," Signor Seguso replied gently. "Itwas hopeless."

The fireman shook his head and looked up at the Fenice. "Everytime a piece of that ceiling fell, a piece of my heart fell with it."

"Mine, too," said Signor Seguso, "but you must not blameyourself."

"It will always haunt me that we couldn't save it."

"Look around you," Signor Seguso said. "You saved Venice."

With that the old man turned and set off slowly down CalleCaotorta on his way to Fondamente Nuove, where he would take thevaporetto, or water bus, to his glassworks factory in Murano. Whenhe was younger, the mile-long walk to the vaporetto had taken himtwelve minutes. Now it took an hour.

In Campo Saint'Angelo, he turned and looked back. A wide,spiraling column of smoke, floodlit from beneath, rose like a luridspecter against the sky.

At the far side of the campo, he entered the shopping street, Callede la Mandola, where he encountered a man in a blue workman'sjumper washing the windows of the pastry shop. Window washerswere the only people who were at work at that early hour, and theyalways greeted him as he walked by.

"Ah, maestro!" said the man in blue. "We were worried aboutyou last night, living so close to the Fenice."

"You're very kind," said Signor Seguso, bowing slightly andtouching the brim of his hat, "but we were never really in any danger,thank goodness. We 've lost our theater, though..."

Signor Seguso neither stopped nor slowed his pace. Shortly aftersix, he arrived at the glassworks and walked into the cavernous furnaceroom. Six large furnaces clad in ceramic blocks were rangedabout the room, set well apart, all of them firing and filling the spacewith a constant, rumbling roar. He conferred with an assistant aboutthe colors he wanted to prepare for the day. Some would be transparent,some opaque. There would be yellow, orange, red, purple,umber, cobalt, gold leaf, white, and black--more colors than he normallyused, but the assistant did not ask why, and the master did notoffer to explain.

When the glass was ready, he stood in front of the open furnace,steel pipe in hand, looking calmly, deeply into the fire. Then,with a smooth, graceful motion, he dipped the end of the pipe intothe reservoir of molten glass in the furnace and turned it slowly,over and over, pulling it out when the glowing, pear-shaped lump atthe end was just the right size to begin making the vase he hadin mind.

The first vase, of what would eventually be more than a hundred,was unlike anything he had ever made before. Against anopaque background as black as night, he had set swirling ribbons ofsinuous diamond shapes in red, green, white, and gold, leaping, overlapping,and spiraling upward around the vase. He never explainedwhat he was doing, but by the second vase, everyone knew. It was arecord of the fire in glass--the flames, the sparks, the embers, andthe smoke--just as he had seen it from his window, glinting throughthe louvers, reflected in the rippling water at the bottom of the canal,and rising far into the night.

In the coming days, the municipality of Venice would conductan inquiry to discover what had happened on the evening of January29, 1996. But on the morning of the thirtieth, while the Fenice'sembers still smoldered, one preeminent Venetian had already startedto compose his own testimony in glass, while at the same time creatinga work of terrible beauty.