What makes the heart of this glorious urban dowager – or at least her pacemaker – tick?Īt first sight, Berendt – a cultivated New Yorker, whom (to declare an interest) I first encountered in Venice some four years ago, while working on a book of my own – may seem an unlikely chronicler of that city’s inner life.WAS it the Mafia? An arsonist? Corrupt building contractors? Or city negligence? “There are no accidents,” whispers one female onlooker watching in horror the burning of Venice’s fabled La Fenice opera house in 1996 – thus setting the stage and providing the Greek chorus for author John Berendt’s long-awaited follow-up to his nonfiction best-seller “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”įans of “Midnight” – which delved into the death of a young male hustler allegedly shot to death by a prominent gay Savannah antiques dealer – will be happy to know that Berendt utilizes many of the same storytelling devices he did in his enduring, decade-old mystery-travelogue. But his real concern is with Venice present: to reveal what goes on behind its often dark and shuttered façades. Of course, its author, John Berendt, is as captivated as any by Venice’s beauty and fascinated by its glorious past. All of which makes this new book’s sentiment-dispelling astringency both welcome and arresting. Sentimentality envelops the very idea of Venice like the city’s swirling winter mists. Ever since the eighteenth century, the city has been packaged and repackaged as the cynosure of nostalgia: the Venice of faded grandeur and sunny cuteness in Canaletto’s picture-postcard vedute of noble, delectable decay in Ruskin of languid erotic charge in Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice. Ah, Venice – the city of Gothic palaces and gondolas, of great domed churches and soaring towers, of shimmering light and lapis skies and a thousand other syrupy clichés.
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