by John Berendt
My apartment occupied part of the ground floor of Palazzo da Silva, which had been the British embassy in the seventeenth century. It was just outside the Ghetto, the five-hundred-year-old Jewish quarter, which, as the world’s first ghetto, gave its name to all future ghettos. My new home had three rooms with marble floors, beamed ceilings, and a view of the Misericordia Canal, which flowed along the side of the building like a moat, lapping at the stones ten feet below my window.
On the far side of the canal, the foot traffic along the walk in front of a row of small shops was as peaceful as that of a country lane. The canal itself was a narrow, lightly traveled backwater. Boats passed just often enough to keep the water churning and splashing appealingly. At high tide, traffic was visible above the windowsill, and the boatmen’s voices rang clear and close at hand. As the tide lowered, the men and their boats slipped out of sight, like window washers on a descending scaffold. Their voices receded and acquired an echo as the canal became a deepening trench. Then the tide came in again and lifted the men and boats back into view.
My landlords, Peter and Rose Lauritzen, lived two floors above, on the main floor of the palace, the piano nobile. Peter was American, Rose was English; they had lived in Venice for nearly thirty years. I called them at the suggestion of friends who said they were agreeable people, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Venice, and might have a small guest apartment available in their building.
Peter Lauritzen had written four well-regarded books about Venice, concerning its history, its art, its architecture, and efforts at preservation. His history of Venice, published in 1978, was one of the few to have been written in English since the first, by Horatio Brown, in 1893. Once his books had established him as a cultural historian, Peter began to make his living as a lecturer for upper-echelon tours of Italy and Eastern Europe. His roster of blue-ribbon clients included museum trustees, groups of academic specialists, and wealthy individuals in search of an expert guide. Peter was a man of somewhat formal demeanor, I was told, but dynamic.
It was Rose who had answered the telephone when I called about the apartment months before. She spoke in a swooping, full-throated English drawl that subsided every so often into an incomprehensible mumble before regaining clarity and taking flight again. This remarkable voice materialized, upon my arrival, in the form of a strikingly beautiful woman in her late forties with large, wide-set, smoky-blue eyes, a broad smile, and a billowing mane of shoulder-length brown hair. She was tall, dressed in black, and precariously thin, but fashionably so. As she showed me around the apartment, I discovered she had a wacky charm that expressed itself in emphatic, slightly absurd, often self-mocking remarks. “In Venice,” she said, “no matter what you say, everyone will assume you’re lying. Venetians always embellish, and they take it for granted you will, too. So you might as well. Because, funnily enough, if they discover you’re someone who tells the truth all the time, they’ll simply write you off as a bore.”
Rose explained that the apartment had originally been a storage room with a dirt floor, a magazzino. “We were terribly pleased with ourselves for renovating it,” she said, “until the Comune of Venice, the city government, sent us a letter declaring it illegal! I mean, completely . . . totally . . . illegal! Because we hadn’t got permission. Mind you, the space hadn’t been anything but a rubbish bin for four hundred years, I mean, literally. There was nothing of any architectural value in it. No woodwork, no carvings, no frescoes, no gilt, no anything! I suppose we should have known we had to get permission, but if we had known, we’d probably have dropped the whole idea, because it would have meant having to deal with the Venetian bureaucracy, which is an absolute nightmare, nightmare, niiiightmare!”
In the kitchen, Rose demonstrated how to operate the washing machine without causing a flood, and how to light the oven without igniting a fireball.
“At any rate,” she went on, “when the notice from the Comune arrived, Peter had a megawobbly, and I was frantic, because it meant I would have to go to the Comune and sort it out. Nightmare! But all our friends said, ‘Don’t be silly. Nobody ever bothers to get approval. You simply make whatever renovations you like. Then you go to the city officials and confess! You pay a fine. And they give you a piece of paper called a condono, which makes it all perfectly legal.’ ”
Rose showed me into the living room, which was comfortably furnished with club chairs, reading lamps, a dining room table, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with histories, biographies, art books, travel books, and novels ranging from literary classics to pulp fiction. It was the overflow from the Lauritzens’ library upstairs.
“So I went ’round to the Comune,” she said, “heart in my mouth, and I said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. We had no idea! Non lo sapevamo!’ The man didn’t believe a word I was saying, of course, but he took pity on me—how could he not, seeing my face creased with worry, hair a tangle, voice a pathetic whine? Anyway, he gave me a condono, thank God, because he could have made us tear out all the improvements and turn the apartment back into a storage room again. I mean, torture! Torture, torture, torture!”
Rose was now standing at the window. She pointed out the various shops on the other side of the canal—the butcher shop, the housewares shop, the local headquarters of the Communist Party, a photo shop with faded wedding pictures in the window. A picturesque trattoria, the Antica Mola, stood at center stage; it had tables set up in front despite the chilly weather. “After you’ve eaten at the Antica Mola a few times,” said Rose, “Giorgio will know you’re not a tourist, and he’ll give you a discount. And that is one of the great secrets of Venice: the discount—lo sconto! Tourists would be furious if they ever found out Venetians pay thirty to forty percent less than they do.”
And not only at restaurants, apparently. It would be worth my while, Rose pointed out, to make myself known to various shopkeepers, especially the fruit-and-vegetable vendors. “You’re at their mercy,” she said. “They select the tomatoes or whatever for you. There’s no self-service. And if they know you—and like you—they won’t slip anything damaged or overripe into your bag.
“And you should remember: Everything is negotiable in Venice. I mean everything: prices, rents, doctors’ fees, lawyers’ fees, taxes, fines, even jail terms. Everything! You should even get to know a taxi driver, too, because otherwise the rates can be horribly expensive. That white water taxi parked over there belongs to my pet driver, Pino Panatta, who’s very nice. The taxi is always immaculate, and he’s terribly convenient, because he lives on the other side of the canal, just above the Communists.”
Having shown me all there was to see, Rose invited me to join her and Peter upstairs for a drink. I accepted, and as I turned away from the window, I asked why, in addition to having iron bars, the windows had been fitted with wide-mesh wire screens. The screens would keep bees and butterflies out, I said, but mosquitoes and gnats could fly right through.
“Oh, the screens!” she said as we left the apartment. “They’re not for mosquitoes. They’re for . . . i ratti!” Never had I heard the nearness of rats alluded to in such a lighthearted way. Rose’s laughter echoed in the double-height entrance hall as she led the way up a long, broad flight of stone steps.
THE SPACIOUS, HIGH-CEILINGED CENTRAL HALL, or portego, served as the Lauritzens’ living room. At one end, a bay of tall, arched windows opened through French doors onto a balcony that overlooked the same stretch of Misericordia Canal I could see from water level two floors below. A clear northern light poured into the room, setting the creamy yellow walls aglow. Doors led to rooms on either side of the living room in the classic symmetrical layout of Venetian palaces, as described in Peter Lauritzen’s book The Palaces of Venice.
Lauritzen himself emerged from his study issuing hearty greetings and carrying a bottle of chilled prosecco, the sparkling white wine of the Veneto region. He was wearing a quilted black velvet smoking jacket over a white shirt and patterned tie, and his hair was combed straight back. A n
eatly trimmed mustache and Vandyke beard framed his words, which, although he was from the American Midwest, he spoke in a crisp, headmaster’s English accent. His manner was, if anything, even more spirited than his wife’s.
“Well!” he said. “You’ve certainly chosen a dramatic moment to arrive in Venice!”
“Pure coincidence,” I said. “What have you been hearing about the Fenice?”
“The usual rumors,” he said. “The most common, as always, involve the Mafia.” He handed me a glass of prosecco. “But no matter what the investigation turns up, the general expectation is that we’ll never really know what happened. Nor, finally, does it matter that much. What does matter is the tragedy of losing the Fenice. And I should think the key question would be ‘Will it ever be rebuilt? ’ rather than ‘Who did it?’ Now, that may surprise you, because of all the talk about rebuilding it. In Venice, if you want to fix a crack in a wall, you must get twenty-seven signatures from twenty-four offices, and then it takes six years to fill the crack. I’m not exaggerating. How can anyone build an opera house with that sort of foolishness going on? No, no, Venice’s real Achilles’ heel is not fire and it’s not high water. It’s bureaucracy! I’ll grant you, bureaucracy has prevented a lot of disasters from happening in Venice, like the scheme to demolish all the buildings along the Grand Canal near Piazza San Marco in order to make way for a crystal palace. Still, the bureaucracy is an infuriating irritant.”
“Maddening,” said Rose, “absolutely maddening.”
“And now we have this sloganeering,” said Peter, “this Com’era, dov’era, meaning ‘As it was, where it was.’ It’s impossible to rebuild the Fenice exactly as it was, because the old structure was made of wood, which was essential for the acoustics, and the new one will have to be made of concrete. Can you imagine how a Stradivarius would sound if it were made of concrete?”
“Hideous,” said Rose. “I mean really hideous!”
“And what does ‘as it was’ really mean?” Peter went on. “Does it mean ‘as it was’ in 1792, when Giannantonio Selva’s original Fenice opened?
“Or ‘as it was’ in 1808, when Selva redesigned the interior and built an imperial box for Napoleon?
“Or ‘as it was’ in 1837, after fire destroyed the Fenice the first time and it was rebuilt by the Meduna brothers significantly changed, because the original Selva plans had been lost?
“Or ‘as it was’ in 1854 . . . or in 1937 . . . ?”
With each new name and date, Peter’s voice increased in urgency, in the manner of a prosecuting attorney enumerating a series of ever more serious charges. He stood in the center of the room clutching a lapel with one hand and gesticulating vigorously with the other. His Vandyke jutted out as he spoke, as if to reinforce the assertiveness of his pronouncements.
“There’ve been at least five Fenices in two hundred years,” he said, “not counting dozens of minor alterations in between.”
As Peter spoke, Rose went right on interjecting her own brand of commentary. “Faulty wiring,” she said. “That’s probably what it was. In Venice electricity travels through cables that lie in the muck at the bottom of the canals—worn out, threadbare, corroded. Then they snake up into old buildings, where they were never meant to go, and come right back down into the water in the form of grounding wires. So if your toaster has a short circuit, you’ve probably electrocuted your neighbor.”
But Peter steered the main conversation. “You must keep in mind,” he said, “that Venice is a very Byzantine city. That explains a lot of things. For example: If you are a property owner, you are responsible for making certain repairs to your property. But before you make those repairs, you must get a permit, and permits are very difficult to come by. You find yourself having to bribe city officials to give you a permit so you can make repairs that those very officials would fine you for not making, or for making without a permit.”
“Bribery is a way of life in Venice,” said Rose. “But you can’t really call it bribery. It’s accepted as a legitimate part of the economy.”
“The Anglo-Saxon mentality simply does not exist in Venice,” said Peter. “The Venetian concept of law, for example, is certainly not Anglo-Saxon. A few years ago, two hundred forty-seven people were indicted for various crimes in the lagoon. What happened? All two hundred forty-seven were absolved. The penal code is still the one set up by Mussolini. There have been fifty or sixty governments in Italy since the Second World War, and none has been in power long enough to effect a change.”
“There are laws that have been on the books for centuries,” said Rose. “If you added up all the taxes and fees you supposedly owe, you’d have to pay something like one hundred forty percent of your income.”
Peter noticed that my glass was nearly empty and moved quickly to refill it. “I trust,” he said, pausing to allow the bubbles to settle, “that we’re not giving you the wrong impression—i.e., that we don’t love Venice.”
“We adore it,” said Rose.
“We wouldn’t live anywhere else,” said Peter. “Apart from the obvious attractions, we live in Venice because it has the cleanest air of any city in the world. Not only does Venice have no cars—and you’d be surprised how many people don’t realize that—there’s no burning of fossil fuels at all, because Venice outlawed the use of heating oil in 1973 and switched to methane gas, which burns clean.”
I could not let that remark pass without comment.
“But what about the industrial smokestacks belching smoke just across the lagoon in Marghera and Mestre?”
“What about them?” said Peter, his smile broadening in anticipation of scoring a point. “The prevailing winds blow inland,” he said, “just as they do in all port cities. So the pollution you see coming out of those smokestacks on the mainland blows away from us, not toward us.”
IT MADE SENSE TO ME that people who lived in Venice would talk a lot about Venice, the business of Venice being, after all, Venice itself. But I doubted that many Venetians were as vociferous on the subject as the Lauritzens were. Peter held forth in a manner more in the nature of oratory than conversation—informed, didactic, fiery, confrontational—his discourse punctuated by the occasional “whilst” or “shedule.” Rose, speaking in verbal italics, evoked a Venice of wild extremes—horrific and blissful, ghastly and exquisite, hideous and enchanting. Whether they realized it or not, both Lauritzens presented themselves as beleaguered, like the city itself—but gamely, almost proudly beleaguered, in love with Venice despite its shortcomings. In their eagerness to explain Venice to me, they occasionally overlapped each other, both speaking at the same time without seeming to notice. At such moments, I found myself looking from one to the other, my head nodding and swiveling, as I tried to avoid making the social gaffe of listening to one and ignoring the other.
Peter, for example, was saying, “Venice is not for everybody. To live in Venice, you must, first of all, like living on an island, and you must like living near water. . . .” And Rose, at the same time, was saying, “It’s exactly like an Irish village where everybody knows everybody else. . . .” Oblivious, Peter went right on, “And to live in Venice, you must be able to do without much greenery, and you must not mind walking a great deal.” I heard this over Rose’s, “You’re always running into people you know, because the only way to get around in Venice, whether you’re a countess or a shopkeeper, is to walk or take the vaporetto. You can’t move about unseen in a private car, and in that respect Venice is terribly democratic.”
Keeping up with the Lauritzens at these moments was like listening to stereo with each of the speakers playing a different tune. In one ear, I heard Peter say, “Now, those are very unusual circumstances, and a lot of people who say they love Venice eventually discover they do not.” With the other ear, if I understood correctly, I heard Rose saying, “. . . When I’ve come back from having gone out shopping, Peter doesn’t ask me what I bought. He asks who I saw.”
“The key word is ‘claustrophobic,�
��” said Peter. “I listen for it. Because whenever I hear ‘claustrophobic’ mentioned in connection with Venice, I know that the person who said it would never be happy living here.”
“Funnily enough, I like it that Venice is a village,” said Rose simultaneously.
