There is the mystery surrounding the fire of the Fenice, and there are gossipy stories involving many of the locals (most of whom are actually expatriates and not native Venetians). There are few cohesive lines through this book. Berendt offers a multiple of theories surrounding the fire, from Mafia participation to a neglectful renovation crew. Written by the same man who wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this book takes the reader to Venice shortly after the well-renowned Fenice Theatre burned down.
The fire and its aftermath serve as a leitmotif that runs throughout, adding the elements of chaos, corruption, and crime and contributing to the ever-mounting suspense of this brilliant book.
In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur the master glassblower of Venice and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.īerendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to reveal a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. Its architectural treasures crumble-foundations shift, marble ornaments fall-even as efforts to preserve them are underway. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.
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