The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  Padua

  A university city twenty-five miles west of Venice.

  Palazzo Barbaro

  A double palace on the Grand Canal, built in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and owned since 1885 by the Curtis family, originally of Boston.

  Palazzo Pisani-Moretta

  Fifteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal, available to rent for parties. Often illuminated exclusively by candlelight.

  Peggy Guggenheim Collection

  Paintings and sculpture assembled by the American collector of modern art Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), housed in her former residence—an unfinished palace on the Grand Canal.

  Piazzale Roma

  Large parking area and bus depot in western Venice at the foot of the bridge to the mainland.

  Rialto

  Area around the Rialto Bridge, one of three bridges that cross the Grand Canal. Name derived from Riva Alta, meaning “high riverbank.”

  St. George’s Church

  The English Church, on Campo San Vio.

  St. Mark’s

  Refers to both St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco) and St. Mark’s Basilica. San Marco is also the name of one of the six sestieri, or neighborhoods, of Venice.

  Salute Church

  See: Santa Maria della Salute.

  Santa Maria dei Miracoli

  Fifteenth-century church, restored by Save Venice.

  Santa Maria della Salute

  Baroque church on the Grand Canal, in Dorsoduro, opposite St. Mark’s. Since its domes are visible from great distances, it is an orienting landmark.

  Strada Nuova

  A main thoroughfare in the Canareggio district of Venice.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Of my brilliant editor, Ann Godoff, I will say simply that when she left the publishing house that brought out my first book and came to the house that has published this one, I followed without a moment’s hesitation, and I would do the same again. My literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, also moved, from one agency to another, and I went along with her just as readily and for many of the same reasons.

  In addition to the people whose cooperation is made clear in these pages, there were a great many others who were enormously helpful. In Venice there was, above all, Pamela Santini, whose cheerful assistance was invaluable to me—whether helping out when my knowledge of Italian was inadequate, cutting bureaucratic red tape, or providing research assistance.

  Among the Venetians, first a fond thank-you to the late Alessandro Albrizzi, who in the early 1980s, and with great good humor, was the first to invite me through the invisible door that leads from the public to the private world of Venice.

  I would also like to thank, for various reasons, Robert Beard, William Blacker, Atalanta Bouboulis, Carla Ferrara, Joan FitzGerald, Fiora Gandolfi, Geoffrey Humphries, Antonio Leonardi, Jim Mathes, William McNaughton, Randy Mikelson, Aurelio Montanari, Ewa Morgan, Robert Morgan, Sergio Perosa, Pete Peters, Tim Red-man, Stefano Rosso-Mazzinghi, Jeremy Scott, Toni Sepeda, Holly Snapp, and Hiram Williams. For their unstinting efforts at The Penguin Press, I am much obliged to Liza Darnton, Tracy Locke, Sarah Hutson, Darren Haggar, Claire Vaccaro, and Kate Griggs.

  For their many helpful comments on the manuscript, I am indebted to Carol Deschere, John and Ginger Duncan, Annie Flanders, Sue Fletcher, Linda Hyman, Rhoda Koenig, Deborah Mintz, Joan Kramer, and Marilyn Perry. Throughout the research and writing of this book, Sean Strub has been a source of support and encouragement, as well as a perceptive and much valued sounding board.

  In the course of my research, I consulted a great many published sources. Among them, I found Gianluca Amadori’s coverage of the Fenice fire and its tangled aftermath for Il Gazzettino especially helpful. His reports are assembled and reworked in his excellent book Per Quattro Soldi (Editori Riuniti, Rome, 2003).

  The superb catalog for the exhibition mounted by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in April 2004, Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, was enlightening on the subject of the Boston Curtises, Palazzo Barbaro, and Henry James, as was Rosella Mamoli Zorzi’s informed commentary in Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro (Pushkin Press, London, 1998).

  I am grateful as well to the Marciana Library for making the diary of Daniel Sargent Curtis (1825-1908) available to me, to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale for providing access to the Olga Rudge Papers, and to the authors of the indispensable Calli, Campielli e Canali (Edizioni Helvetia) for enabling me to find even the most cleverly hidden, impossibly out-of-the-way places in Venice.