The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  The experts had reached this conclusion, they said, because it had been established that the last workmen had left the theater at 7:30 P.M., and the fire had not broken out until at least an hour later. According to their theory, fires caused by arson generally involve the use of highly flammable substances and are raging within minutes of being set. Accidental fires tend to smolder awhile, and from all appearances the fire at the Fenice had smoldered for at least two hours. Heavy wooden beams supporting the floor of the lobby on the third level, the ridotto del loggione, where the blaze had presumably started, had burned through completely, indicating a slow, penetrating start to the fire. Most likely, according to the preliminary report, the fire started when resins used to refinish the wooden flooring had been accidentally ignited by a spark, or a short circuit, or the stub of a cigarette, or the heat from an overloaded electrical cable. More than a thousand kilos of the resins had been stored in the ridotto, and some of the containers had been left open. The experts also noted that eight people who had been in the vicinity of the Fenice that evening had come forward after the fire to say they had smelled something burning as early as six o’clock. This, too, would have been consistent with a smoldering fire.

  Given what they knew, the experts estimated that the fire had smoldered for about two or three hours, meaning that it had started around 6:00 P.M.

  In their initial report, the experts cited the chaotic conditions at the Fenice that had made an accidental fire a near inevitability. The prosecutor, Felice Casson, compiled a list of people he deemed responsible for those conditions, then summoned them to the chief magistrate’s office and informed them they were under investigation for criminal negligence. It was understood that if the investigations resulted in formal charges, he would seek jail terms.

  Mayor Massimo Cacciari headed the list of possible defendants. As mayor, Cacciari was automatically president of the Fenice, so the safety of the theater was his responsibility. The others under investigation included the general manager of the Fenice, the secretary-general, the financial chief, the custodian, the director of the restoration work, and the chief engineer of Venice.

  Most of the accused were men of influence, and they immediately hired the most politically powerful lawyers available. Despite elements of the case in their favor, however, there was one significant factor working against them: Felice Casson, an unusually courageous and relentless prosecutor.

  The forty-two-year-old Casson did not look the part. Bespectacled and slight of stature, he had lank brown hair, a pallid complexion, and a youthful face, the most prominent feature of which, paradoxically, was a receding chin. Casson had been born in Chioggia, a tiny fishing village at the southern tip of the Lido, and he was utterly without social pretense or ambition. His one sartorial quirk was a preference for collarless sport shirts, which he wore virtually all the time, even under his black judicial robes. He played on a soccer team with other magistrates, but his real passion was American basketball. On trips to the United States, even business trips, he always made arrangements to see at least one NBA game, and he still talked about a memorable contest between the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks in which Michael Jordan managed to brush off two defensive players assigned to guard him throughout the game. But, all in all, Felice Casson was the sort of person who could pass through a roomful of people unnoticed. His presence was so light that you could almost imagine him walking through walls. However, he had one physical characteristic that hinted at the presence of an inner turbulence, of banked fires waiting to burst into flame. It was the tendency, when he was angered, for his face to turn pink, then red, then scarlet, from the top of his forehead to the neckband of his collarless shirt. Neither his expression nor his voice betrayed the slightest emotion, but there was no disguising the litmus of his face. He was known for it. Defendants due to be cross-examined by Casson were cautioned to watch for the crimson blush and to be guided accordingly.

  Casson had established himself as a hard-driving investigating prosecutor early in his career when, in 1982, he reopened an unresolved 1972 bombing case in which three policemen had been murdered near Trieste. The policemen, responding to a telephone tip about a suspicious car, had opened the hood of the car and set off a bomb that killed them instantly. The deaths were blamed on the militant Red Brigades, and hundreds of leftists were brought in for questioning, but no one was ever charged. Ten years later, Casson, then a twenty-eight-year-old prosecutor, was given the task of reviewing the case in the expectation that he would tie up a few loose ends and close the file for good.

  Instead, despite receiving intentionally misleading information from the police and the secret service, Casson managed to turn the case on its head. He discovered, first of all, that the police had never investigated the incident. When he traced the explosives, he found that the trail led to a right-wing group. He quickly arrested the culprit and obtained a confession that included the startling revelation that within three weeks of the bombing, the true story had been known to the police, the Ministry of the Interior, the Customs and Excise police, and the civilian and military secret services. All of these agencies had conspired to cover it up for political reasons. Casson put the guilty party behind bars, but he did not stop there.

  He demanded and was granted permission to search the archives of the Italian secret service. There he found documents revealing the existence of a covert, high-level paramilitary army, code-named Gladio, that had been set up and financed by the American CIA in 1956 for the purpose of waging guerrilla warfare in case the Soviet Union ever invaded Italy. Gladio was furnished with a secret training camp in Sardinia and had 139 arms and weapons depots hidden across northern Italy. Gladio’s 622 operatives were trained in intelligence gathering, sabotage, radio communications, and creating escape networks.

  While the establishment of a “stay-behind” resistance militia could be justified in the Cold War environment, Casson found disturbing references to “internal subversion” in the Gladio documents. Casson then discovered that the organization’s largely far-right-wing network of operatives had used Gladio’s supplies and infrastructure to stage terrorist attacks within Italy, with the intention of implicating domestic political parties on the left.

  Quietly pursuing his investigation through the 1980s, Casson uncovered evidence linking Gladio to a wave of deadly bombings in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, all of which had been blamed on the left. The chain of evidence also suggested that Gladio had taken part in no fewer than three abortive attempts to overthrow the legitimate government of Italy—in 1964, 1969, and 1973.

  Casson finally went public in 1990, when he insisted on interviewing Italy’s prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. He forced Andreotti to go before Parliament and deliver a detailed report about Gladio, which for thirty years he had denied existed. At the same time, Casson subpoenaed President Francesco Cossiga and compelled him to admit under oath that he had helped organize Gladio when he worked in the Ministry of Defense in the 1960s. Andreotti soon ordered Gladio dismantled.

  As a direct result of Casson’s revelations, information came pouring out about the existence of similar Gladio-type secret armies set up by the CIA in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Turkey.

  Casson’s pursuit of Gladio was unflinching, despite the obvious danger. As he later admitted, “It was a terrible feeling to realize that I was the only person who knew about the existence of Gladio, except for the members of Gladio themselves, and to think they could kill me at any moment.”

  Compared to the harrowing ordeal of stalking a murderous clandestine militia all by himself, the prospect of taking on a group of genteel white-collar functionaries for malfeasance at the Fenice Opera House must have seemed to Casson like gliding in a gondola.

  Knowing that any attempt at deal making would be futile, lawyers for the accused instead attacked the credibility of Casson’s panel of experts. Francesco D’Elia, the atto
rney for the Fenice’s custodian, heaped scorn on the selection of two of the experts: Alfio Pini, the head of the fire brigade, and Leonardo Corbo, the national director of civil protection.

  “They name the fire chief as an expert?” D’Elia exclaimed to a television reporter. “He should be a defendant! He was five minutes away from the Fenice when the fire started, but he didn’t get there until half an hour later. What took him so long? Even I was there before he was. And his boss in Rome, Corbo, he should be held responsible too, because the fire brigade mishandled the fire in every way. Did they use the proper procedures? Did they have the proper equipment? The fire chief and his boss say yes, but what do you expect them to say? If they had told the truth, it would have amounted to an admission of guilt.

  “The firemen didn’t know in advance that the canal at the Fenice was empty and closed, and they should have. They had to turn back and go down another canal, wasting precious minutes.

  “All they had with them were old canvas hoses, three of which broke and had to be fixed.

  “They had old wooden ladders, which were too short to reach the windows.

  “They didn’t have fire-repellent uniforms.

  “They didn’t have canisters that release oxygen-absorbing chemicals that literally suffocate a fire. This is standard equipment for fighting fires in empty buildings today. The firemen were inadequately equipped, and that’s the fault of Pini and Corbo, the so-called experts.”

  In response to these charges, Casson explained that the fire chief, Alfio Pini, was included in the panel in order to provide safe access to the Fenice and help the panel obtain anything it felt it needed in the way of evidence. Leonardo Corbo, the director of Italy’s civil protection, had a lengthy list of credentials as an expert in fires and firefighting, with special expertise relating to fires in theaters. Though Casson coolly dismissed D’Elia’s objections, it was noted that the telltale flush in Casson’s face had reached a dangerous shade of pink.

  Casson had been the magistrate on call the night the Fenice caught fire, which meant that he was the first city official the police and fire departments were supposed to contact in case of an emergency. In the excitement, they forgot. However, Casson lived with a woman who was a television journalist for RAI; they were at home in Cannaregio when she received a call from RAI about the fire. They went up to their altana and saw the flames. Five minutes later, Casson was in a police launch on the way to the Fenice. He arrived on the scene in time to witness a territorial dispute between the local police and the national police, the carabinieri. Both were claiming they had arrived at the fire first. A police officer was saying to an officer of the carabinieri, “In any case, we have jurisdiction in the city, and you don’t,” and the carabiniere countered with, “But we are better equipped to handle this kind of investigation than you are.” Casson performed his first official act of the night by intervening and telling both sides that the office of the public prosecutor was responsible, so he, Casson, would decide who was in charge of what.

  Shortly before midnight, Casson went to police headquarters, the Questura, and signed an order sealing the theater and making it a crime for anyone to enter it without authorization. His intention was to protect the integrity of the evidence, and to do that he was willing to keep the theater sealed for months if necessary. He would not permit salvage crews to move any of the debris until the investigators had finished their work. He even rebuffed the superintendent, who was struggling to arrange a benefit concert for the Fenice and wanted to retrieve files on major donors from his office, which was in a part of the building that was not completely destroyed.

  Casson gave the panel of experts sixty days to complete their technical analysis of the evidence and issue a final report. He wanted answers to eleven questions: the time and place the fire started; whether the cause was arson or negligence; the time of the “flashover,” when the fire spread to other parts of the theater; the condition of the theater before the fire; the extent of fire-prevention systems inside and outside the theater; the situation regarding the canals around the Fenice; the condition of smoke and fire detectors prior to the fire; the nature of substances present in the theater at the time of the fire; analysis of the ashes from the ridotto; a description of the wiring in the theater; and, finally, an estimate of damages and identification of those responsible for any dangerous conditions.

  It was generally assumed that the panel’s ultimate conclusions would confirm its preliminary finding, which, as the Gazzettino reported, ruled out arson “with near-mathematical certainty.”

  Leonardo Corbo, the civil protection chief from Rome, had been named chairman of the panel. He announced that they would study the rubble of the theater with forensic precision, as if the Fenice were a corpse laid out on an autopsy table.

  “Every fire has its DNA,” he said, “its black box. Fires leave certain indelible traces. Some are obvious and can be identified at a glance. Others cannot be seen with the naked eye but can be analyzed with the help of sophisticated technologies and instruments, which, fortunately, we have.”

  TWO WEEKS AFTER THE FIRE, courtesans and Casanovas began appearing in the streets of Venice, the former in low-cut bodices and silk stockings, the latter in knee breeches, all in powdered wigs. People in masks, capes, gowns, frock coats, buckled shoes, and all manner of silly hats swarmed through the streets from early morning till late at night in celebration of Carnival. A mime, his hands, face, and hair painted silver to match his silver clothes, stood stock-still at the foot of the Accademia Bridge, a statue in monochrome. A circle of onlookers stood around him, watching for the slightest blink or tremble to assure themselves they were looking at a live person. Another mime, this one solid gold, struck poses in St. Mark’s Square; a third, pure white, stood immobile for thirty minutes in Campo San Bartolomeo, near the Rialto.

  The colorful celebration swirling through the streets was actually a recent revival of the centuries-old Venetian festival. Napoleon had put an end to it when he defeated the Venetian Republic. By then Carnival had reached the height of decadence, having grown from a two-week period of merrymaking to six months of parties, dances, spectacles, games, and walking around Venice behind masks, incognito. It was not until the late 1970s that a serious revival took place; it was prompted in part by Federico Fellini’s exotic and surreal 1976 film Casanova. The reincarnation of Carnival started in a small way, on the island of Burano and in working-class neighborhoods, with plays and costume parties in the local squares. Before long the revels became citywide, then tourists started joining in, and finally an industry grew up around them, the most noticeable feature being the mask shops opening all over Venice. They were little nooks of color and fantasy, their stage-lit windows lighting up darkened side streets all year long. Soon masks were a favorite tourist icon. But with the appearance of each new mask shop, there always seemed to be one less greengrocer, one less bakery, one less butcher shop, to the consternation of Venetians, who found themselves having to walk twice as far to buy a tomato or a loaf of bread. Mask shops became a detested symbol of the city’s capitulation to tourism at the expense of its livability.

  One mask shop, however, was spared any such opprobrium. It was Mondonovo, the studio of Guerrino Lovato, a sculptor and set designer, who had been instrumental in resurrecting Carnival back in the days when it was attended only by Venetians. Lovato had started making masks in his sculpture studio, almost as a public service. They were a beloved novelty, and his studio became the first mask shop in Venice.

  Mondonovo was a few steps beyond the Ponte dei Pugni, the “Bridge of Fists.” The front of the shop was cluttered with sculpted objects piled on shelves, hanging on walls, suspended from the ceiling, leaning, standing, and stacked on the floor. There was hardly any room for customers to move. In addition to masks, Signor Lovato and his assistants also made figurines, busts, cherubs, escutcheons, and various pieces of architectural ornamentation in the baroque rococo style. But masks predominated.


  Signor Lovato was a muscular man with a dense, dark beard turning white. The day I met him, he was wearing a bulky gray sweater and a knitted cap. While a young assistant sat at a worktable applying gold paint to a papier-mâché mask, Signor Lovato showed me the classic Carnival masks, starting with the earliest, which were based on the commedia dell’arte characters—Pulcinello, Pedrolino, Harlequin, the Plague Doctor, and Brighella. The mask for each character was distinguished by a salient feature: a hooked nose, a long nose, a wart on the forehead.

  “By the eighteenth century,” Lovato said, “people were wearing masks in public most of the time, and for one reason only—to be anonymous. So the most popular masks then were plain ones that covered the whole face and represented no characters at all. They, too, have become classics.” He showed me two: a plain black mask for women, called a morello, and a white mask for men, called a bauta, which had a jutting, prowlike nose and a jaw that came all the way down to the chin. The bauta was usually worn with a tricornered hat.