by John Berendt
“The sky was red,” he said. “Burning pieces of wood were flying overhead, all the way from the Fenice. I went home right away and changed into my uniform.”
“And then you went to the Fenice?”
“No. That night my . . . my colleagues were there instead. I had to be here to direct the helicopter.”
Mario reached into a voluminous pocket and pulled out a pair of bright orange plastic earphones. He put them on his head. In one hand he held a megaphone, in the other a pair of binoculars. Then, looking up at the sky above St. Mark’s, he fanned his arms in imitation of a ground-crew technician on the tarmac signaling to an airplane pilot. His motions were so exaggerated that he could just as easily have been taken for a man marooned on a desert island desperately trying to catch the attention of a passing plane.
“When the helicopter flew over the Grand Canal to pick up water,” he said, “I gave them the go-ahead!”
Mario went on waving his arms and staring up at the sky with a beatific smile on his face.
People walking along the quayside paused to look up, too, wondering what the commotion was about. All they could see was a peaceful daytime sky. How could they know that Capitano Mario Moro was reliving his imagined heroics of the night the Fenice burned—sending signals to a helicopter pilot who acknowledged his command with a crisp salute, then banked into a steep descent, skimmed the surface of the Grand Canal, and scooped up another tankful of water.
MY CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH MARIO MORO happened while I was on my way to see a man who had piqued my curiosity earlier in the week by giving a newspaper interview in which he lambasted the management of the Venice Film Festival as “corrupt petty officials, who chose lousy little flavor-of-the-month films to compete for awards over bigger, quality movies.”
The man could not be dismissed as a mere crank, because he was Count Giovanni Volpi, the son of the festival’s founder—Count Giuseppe Volpi—and every year he provided the Volpi Cups that were presented to the best actor and best actress. As it happened, the film festival was only one of many targets of Giovanni Volpi’s rage. He was angry at all of Venice.
Chief among Volpi’s grievances was the posthumous condemnation of his father, which Giovanni considered flagrantly unjust. Despite what people thought about the late Giuseppe Volpi, it was generally conceded that he was the most significant Venetian of the twentieth century, and the film festival was among the least of his achievements.
Giuseppe Volpi brought electric power to Venice, northeast Italy, and most of the Balkans in 1903. He conceived of and built the mainland port city of Marghera. He widened the railroad bridge to the mainland, making it possible for cars and trucks to reach Piazzale Roma in Venice. He restored a shabby old palace on the Grand Canal and turned it into the world-famous Gritti Hotel; then he bought five-star hotels throughout Italy, creating a monopoly and founding the luxury hotel chain CIGA. He was instrumental in creating the Correr Museum in St. Mark’s Square. He negotiated the Turkish-Italian peace treaty of 1912, which gave Libya and the island of Rhodes to Italy, and he later served as Libya’s governor. He mediated the payment of Italy’s debt to the United States and Great Britain after World War I, on extremely favorable terms for Italy. He attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as a member of the Italian delegation, and he later became Mussolini’s finance minister.
For most of his career, Giuseppe Volpi was popularly known, in person and in the press, by the nickname “the Last Doge of Venice.” But now, fifty years later, he was primarily remembered as being a high-ranking member of the Fascist regime. He was regarded in Venice with ambivalence at best, and this is what most infuriated his son.
Giovanni Volpi’s comments about the film festival made him a topic of conversation for a few days, and I learned the outline of his story.
He had been born out of wedlock in 1938 to Giuseppe Volpi and his mistress, Nathalie LaCloche, a French Algerian, a pied-noir— blond, brilliant, and beautiful. Giuseppe, who was married and the father of two adult daughters, legitimized Giovanni’s birth by arranging to have the government pass a law that was wiped off the books as soon as it served its purpose. Four years later, in 1942, Count Volpi’s wife died, and he married Nathalie LaCloche. They lived most of the time in Volpi’s huge palace in Rome and spent summers in a villa on the Giudecca.
Toward the end of the war, the Germans captured Volpi and injected him with powerful chemicals to try to make him talk but succeeded only in destroying his health. He died in Rome in 1947 at the age of seventy, leaving the nine-year-old Giovanni a vast estate that included the seventy-five-room Palazzo Volpi on the Grand Canal, a three-hundred-room palace in Rome, a four-thousand-acre ranch in Libya, and other properties and holdings sufficient to keep Giovanni living in style in the well-appointed, fully staffed villa on the Giudecca. He had a flotilla of three motorboats, including the oldest one in Venice—his father’s 1928 handcrafted Celli, which turned heads everywhere he went in it. Giovanni Volpi never moved into his palace on the Grand Canal, and in fact, after the death of his mother, no one lived there. Nevertheless, he kept it furnished and spotlessly maintained.
“Ah, Giovanni,” said a Venetian woman who knew him well. “He can be so witty and full of fun, but most of the time he’s deeply discontented. He has an almost princely status in Venice, but he rejects it. If you invite him to a party, he won’t say yes, he won’t say no, and he won’t show up. He hates Venetians!”
For some reason, however, Volpi got on well with Americans. When I heard this, I decided to give him a call, thinking it might be worthwhile to hear a contrarian’s view of Venice. “No problem,” he said as soon as I asked. “Come on over.”
Volpi’s house on the Giudecca, the Villa Ca’ Leone, lay behind a high brick wall that ran along a quiet canal directly across from the mysterious Garden of Eden, which hid behind its own brick wall. A housekeeper answered the door and led me through an allée of fragrant gardenias into the living room. French doors looked out on a broad view of the lagoon, southward—in other words, away from Venice. The décor of the room was not especially identifiable as Venetian, which may have been its point. I could hear Volpi in the next room winding up a telephone conversation in French. He joined me as soon as he was through and, after offering me a drink, sat down opposite me. He was wearing a dark wool shirt, corduroy slacks, and heavy all-weather shoes. He had a brooding expression, which broke into a brief, fleeting grin.
“Okay, go ahead!” he said. “What would you like to know?”
“Forgive me for being blunt,” I said, “but what’s the problem between you and Venice?”
He laughed, but as soon as he started talking, I could tell it was no joking matter. He spoke fluent English in an earnest, low-pitched voice.
“I am the son of a self-made man who single-handedly propelled Venice into the twentieth century and maintained it in perfect working order until the war. He died in 1947, and ever since then it’s been downhill.”
“In what way?”
“It’s hard to know where to begin. Well, okay, the industrial port of Marghera. That’s the Big Polluter, the Destroyer of the Ecology in the lagoon! Right? And my father is supposedly a villain for building it. When my father designed Marghera in 1917, Venetians were starving. They were wearing rags, living five in a room. Ten thousand jobs were needed. So he built the port, filled in some marshes, developed the site for the government, and sold parcels of land to various industries—shipyards and manufacturing. It was only after the war, after he was dead, that the people in charge, the idiots, filled in two more big sections of the lagoon. He never intended to do that, and now of course everyone knows it was an ecological mistake.
“But worst of all, also after he was dead, they built oil refineries in Marghera and brought big tankers into the lagoon. Oil tankers draw more water than any other ship in the world, so an extremely deep channel had to be dug for them. The average depth of the lagoon is four or five feet, but the tanker channel is fift
y feet deep. Water used to flow gently into and out of the lagoon with the tides. Now it whooshes in and out, and the bottom gets all stirred up. That’s what’s really destroying the ecology. My father would never have allowed that to happen. And yet he’s blamed for it.
“If you watch the tankers cruising through the lagoon, they don’t seem to be making waves, but they’re displacing eighty thousand tons of water as they move, and the water has to rush in behind them to fill the vacuum. Today the tankers give Venice a wide berth, but in the first few years they came so close they sucked water out of the little side canals as they went by. I used to see it happen outside my door all the time. The water level would suddenly drop—whoosh—and then come rushing back up again. That kind of turbulence destabilizes the foundations.”
Volpi was speaking with energy, but there was a note of despair in his voice. Every so often, he released a deep sigh.
“After the war, my father was investigated for profiting under the regime and brought to trial, and so were other major figures in Italy. He was winning at every turn, when an amnesty was declared and the trial was stopped. That was unfortunate for my father, because it left doubts hanging. And today people still say he got rich through Fascism, but that’s just propaganda. Mussolini came to power in 1922. My father made his fortune in electricity and the CIGA hotel chain decades earlier. He was no more or less a Fascist than Senator Agnelli, who founded Fiat.
“People also say Mussolini gave my father the title of count. Again it’s an intentional lie. Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.”
Volpi got up and went into the other room. He came back with a photocopy of a letter from Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, declaring that His Majesty the King took great pleasure in conferring the hereditary title of count upon Giuseppe Volpi. The letter was dated December 23, 1920—pre-Mussolini.
“Because of these intentional falsehoods,” Volpi went on, “Venetians shun the memory of my father. They rarely speak his name. And when they do, it is only because they cannot avoid it. If they give him credit for anything, they declare failure for themselves, because no one in Venice has done anything as positive as he did since he died. His real crime was being a prophet in his own time, in his own country.”
“But,” I said, “your father is buried at the Frari Church, which is considered the Pantheon of Venice. That’s a great honor, isn’t it?”
“Sure it is, but Venice didn’t put him there. It was Pope John XXIII who did it, and nobody dared say no to him. He knew my father, and he wrote the epitaph engraved on his tomb: ‘INGENIO, LABORE ET FIDE [Intelligence, Work and Faith] Johannes XXIII p.p.’ Today it would be impossible to bury him at the Frari.”
“How does the rest of your family feel about all this?” I asked.
“There is no ‘rest of the family,’” he said. “I mean, there is, but there isn’t.” Volpi paused for a moment and heaved a deep sigh. Then he perked up again. “Well, I guess now I have to tell you how, or rather why, I was born. Actually, it’s a pretty good story.
“In 1937 my father was nearly sixty. He had the two married daughters, one grandson, and two granddaughters but no son of his own. So he goes to the father of his grandson, his son-in-law, who was a Cicogna, an important family name in Milan, and he says, ‘I’m thinking about what happens after I die. I’ve spent my whole life building all that I’ve built, but I don’t have a son to leave it to. What would you say if I adopted your son? He would take the name Volpi and carry on after me.’ The son-in-law decides to play double or nothing, and he says indignantly, ‘You? A Volpi adopting a Cicogna!? You want my son to give up a family name glorified through hundreds of years of history? How can you even think such a thing?!’ He expected my father to come back with an offer of a lot of money. But instead my father cuts him short and says, ‘Wait a moment! Stop there! Tell you what, this conversation never happened. Excuse me for even mentioning it. As far as I’m concerned, the subject never came up.’
“So Cicogna doesn’t get double, he gets nothing, and my father goes to my mother and says, ‘Do you want to make a kid?’ And that’s how I was born.”
“You have a lot to thank the Cicognas for,” I said.
“Mmm, sure,” said Volpi. “Anyway, my arrival screwed up my sisters’ inheritance expectations, as you can imagine. So in 1946, when my father was very ill, lawyers come to him, accompanied by the good-for-nothing sons-in-law, and they demand he pay them something like twenty million dollars in today’s money.
“My father says, ‘Why? I give my daughters money all the time. But I never dig into capital.’ So the lawyers say—and this is fantastic—‘This time you’ll have to dig into capital. Otherwise we’ll have the racial laws applied, and your marriage will be annulled, because your wife was born a Jew, which is forbidden, as you know. And we’ll have Giovanni’s legitimacy annulled as well.’
“I thought all the racial laws were canceled at the end of the war,” I said.
“Yes, but in Italy, not right away. The racial laws were not being enforced, but they hadn’t actually been abolished yet. So my father, who was pretty cool, sends a friend to talk with the Vatican secretary of state, who says, ‘As absurd as it might sound, if I were Count Volpi, I would pay, because the case could come before an anti-Semitic judge who could legitimately rule against him.’
“My father knew that if he lost, the ruling would be reversed as soon as the racial laws were abolished, which was only a matter of time. But by then the horse would be out of the barn, so to speak, and he would never recover all the money, or even most of it. So he takes his good, sweet time and starts paying by installments. When he’s paid three-quarters of it, the racial laws are abolished and he stops paying. My half sisters have always sworn they never blackmailed their father, but there’s the record of the money he paid them. So then they say, well, it was their husbands who did it.”
“Where are your half sisters now?”
“They were thirty years older than me. One’s dead, the other lives near the Salute.”
“Is she as resentful as you are about the lack of respect for your father’s memory?”
“Resentful! On the contrary,” said Volpi, “she denounced him herself! She gave interviews on American television in the 1960s and 1970s, saying her father had ‘unfortunately’ created Marghera. When you hear that from one of his daughters, you naturally have to assume that Giuseppe Volpi must really have been a criminal.”
“Have you ever talked to her about it?”
“I haven’t spoken to her since 1947.”
“That’s heavy.”
“Well, but it’s so unjust! Venice was my father’s passion. He had nothing but the best interests of Venice at heart. Somebody—I won’t tell you who—somebody wrote a really wonderful description of him. I’ll read it to you.”
Volpi took a book from the shelf and read a passage from it:
“‘Count Giuseppe Volpi is perhaps the only Venetian who truly loves his hometown. For him, Venice is the universal city. If the world became one big Venice, the site of the foremost of human sentiments, he would deem himself to be a happy man. His melancholy hinges on the knowledge that this dream can never be realized.’”
Volpi closed the book.
“Okay,” I said. “Who wrote it?”
“Mussolini.”
“Could you ever love Venice?” I asked.
“I do love Venice. It’s the Venetians I’m pissed off at. They’re consumed by jealousy and envy—of everyone and everything. They’re clowns.”
“What would it take for you, finally, to let go of your anger?” I asked.
Volpi thought for a moment, then sighed one of his deep sighs. “The accounts between this city and my father are not settled yet. If Venice names a street or a square after him—and not a minor one—then, and only then, I might feel they’ve given him the recognition he deserves.”
{5}
SLOW BURN
ON THE SAME AFTERNOON that Mario Moro was re
living the night of the Fenice fire, waving signals to his imaginary water-bearing helicopter, the panel of experts investigating the fire handed the chief magistrate their preliminary report: Arson had not been the cause.
