I have just returned from teaching a course in Bologna, Italy at the Johns Hopkins SAIS campus on American foreign policy. After my course was over we visited my favorite city in Europe which is Venice. It is so unique and so different as to be unlike any other place on the planet.
While in Venice I bought to paperback edition of The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt and re-read the book. I had written a review for the January/February, 2006 issue of TransAtlantic magazine.
The excellent and well-written book still provides a great snapshot of the Venice most tourists don’t see in their brief visits. Following is my original book review:
The City of Falling Angels
By John Berendt
The Penguin Press
398 pages; $25.95
Available in Quality Paperback; $15.00  Following a flood in Venice in the 1960s "a great many buildings had eroding foundations and crumbling facades. After part of a marble angel fell from a parapet of the ornate but sadly dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry's Bar, posted a sign outside the church warning, 'Beware of Falling Angels.' "
Obviously, John Berendt chose this sign as the title of his excellent book about the eccentric, intriguing and sometimes bizarre characters who populate one of the world's truly great, beautiful and unique cities. Because Venice is one of my most favorite places to visit in the world, I have read most of the well-known books on the city of canals in northern Italy. Berendt has found a way to top all of these other books by making Venice come alive through its - how else to say it - weird collection of citizens from all walks of life. By profiling these off-beat and often wacky Venetians he has given the reader a splendid portrait of Venice today.
Berendt, the author of the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -detailing the strange doings of the citizens of Savannah, Georgia, has also given us an insight into how the Italian legal system works - or mostly does not work - by using the disastrous fire that destroyed Venice's historic opera house, La Fenice, as the ongoing plot throughout the book.
It is a guessing game and part detective novel as the reader follows the dogged and determined prosecutor Felice Casson as he hunts down various leads to find out who burned down the opera house. Everyone has his or her own views on what happened to La Fenice and why and whether or not the Mafia was involved, but I won't tell who the culprits are as that would give away too much of the plot.
Why does Venice seem so mysterious to the outsider? Berendt relates that "I understand why so many stories set in Venice seem mysterious. Sinister moods could be easily conjured by shadowy back canals and labyrinthine passageways, where even the initiated sometimes lost their way. Reflections, mirrors, and masks suggested that things were not what they seemed."
From the beginning of this fun-to-read book the author quotes one of the Venetian citizens as saying, "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say." And so it is up to the reader to try and determine what is real and what is not.
With a cast of characters ranging from an electrician who dresses up in various outfits to play different roles in his life to the Plant Man to the man who poisons rats for a living to the doctor who works for the city who hires people to kill pigeons when no one is looking, it is sometimes hard to know if so-called "normal" people populate this decaying city.
Surely they do exist but Berendt has made certain that he stayed away from them to bring us a collection of eccentrics who provide a stirring and exciting portrait of Venice.
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