John Berendt: The city of falling angels

Ten years ago, American journalist Berendt astounded readers worldwide with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an account of events leading up to a real-life murder in a Savannah mansion, as much a study of place as people. It was a landmark publication, with crisp prose informed by comprehensive research accelerating the reader through a bizarre affair within the all-important context of the Old South.

Midnight — it was later turned into a rather disappointing movie starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack — won Berendt a non-fiction nomination for the Pultizer Prize ... then he fell quiet.

This book reveals what he's been doing. Berendt has been living in Venice, a city he already knew well, delving in, around, beneath and behind a hybrid of venality, corruption and cultural fragility exposed by the January 1996 arson of its opera house, La Fenice.

The arson, which occurred just before Berendt's arrival in Venice, hit at the heart of the Venetians, who have revered La Fenice as their beloved jewel since the 18th century. But the fire — initially thought to be an accident, later found to have possible Mafia links — is merely a key pivotal point for Berendt as he determines to get beyond the tourism spin on this beautiful sinking city — as far as it is possible for an outsider to do anyway.

If you're an Italian-speaking, world-famous writer in the Pulitzer club, it must help with the contacts — but as one of his aristocratic friends warns him: "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say."

And so Berendt takes the reader on a Venetian ramble which will never be available on a tourist ticket, going to the high-society parties, exploring the crumbling palazzos and the eccentrics who live in them, and having encounters with writers, artists, musicians, fishermen, crooks and lawyers.

He has enormous entertainment with the co-dependent, often unhealthy relationship between Venetian aristocracy and American high society fund-raisers — the ambitious wannabes who want to "save" the city and compete frantically for social status to the point of farce. The world-weary Venetians appear to tolerate them only because the Americans have what they want — money.

There are masked balls, a suicide, a rat-poison millionaire, political shysters, arrests and court cases — then finally the opening of a restored La Fenice in 2003. Berendt paid $600 for a ticket to the opening night party, abuzz with heightened levels of the usual bitchy rivalries.

The City of Falling Angels is in a rather peculiar meandering class of its own, much like the city itself. If you have ever been to Venice and been knocked out by its beauty, but felt excluded from its real heart, you must read this. But you don't have to know Venice or Italy to enjoy this piece of absorbing writing either. Many of the people Berendt features here — especially some of the Americans — won't thank him one little bit for this work, but the rest of us should.

* Sceptre, $36.99