Read Online The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt - Free Book Online
Authors: John Berendt
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senses, the intellect, and the imagination.
Because, despite its miles of tangled streets and canals, Venice was a lot smaller and more manageable than it seemed at first. At eighteen hundred acres, in fact, Venice was barely twice the size of Central Park.
Because I had always found the sound of church bells pealing every fifteen minutes—close at hand and distant, solo and in concert, each with its own persona—a tonic to the ears and nerves.
Because I could not imagine a more enticing beat to assign myself for an indefinite period of time.
And because, if the worst-case scenario for the rising sea level were to be believed, Venice might not be there very long.
{3}
AT WATER LEVEL
I TOOK AN APARTMENT IN CANNAREGIO, a residential quarter sufficiently removed from the main tourist thoroughfare that it still retained its old neighborhood atmosphere: housewives shopping at the open-air food market, children playing in the squares, the Venetian dialect making a lilting singsong of the spoken word. Footsteps and voices were, in fact, the dominant sounds in Venice, since there were no cars to drown them out and very little vegetation to absorb them. Voices carried with startling clarity through the stone-paved squares and alleys. A few fleeting words spoken in the house across the calle sounded surprisingly close, as if they had been uttered by someone in the same room. In the early evenings, people gathered in clusters to gossip in Strada Nuova, the main street of Cannaregio, and the sound of their mingled conversations rose in the air like the buzz of a cocktail party in a large room.
My apartment occupied part of the ground floor of Palazzo da Silva, which had been the British embassy in the seventeenth century. It was just outside the Ghetto, the five-hundred-year-old Jewish quarter, which, as the world’s first ghetto, gave its name to all future ghettos. My new home had three rooms with marble floors, beamed ceilings, and a view of the Misericordia Canal, which flowed along the side of the building like a moat, lapping at the stones ten feet below my window.
On the far side of the canal, the foot traffic along the walk in front of a row of small shops was as peaceful as that of a country lane. The canal itself was a narrow, lightly traveled backwater. Boats passed just often enough to keep the water churning and splashing appealingly. At high tide, traffic was visible above the windowsill, and the boatmen’s voices rang clear and close at hand. As the tide lowered, the men and their boats slipped out of sight, like window washers on a descending scaffold. Their voices receded and acquired an echo as the canal became a deepening trench. Then the tide came in again and lifted the men and boats back into view.
My landlords, Peter and Rose Lauritzen, lived two floors above, on the main floor of the palace, the piano nobile. Peter was American, Rose was English; they had lived in Venice for nearly thirty years. I called them at the suggestion of friends who said they were agreeable people, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Venice, and might have a small guest apartment available in their building.
Peter Lauritzen had written four well-regarded books about Venice, concerning its history, its art, its architecture, and efforts at preservation. His history of Venice, published in 1978, was one of the few to have been written in English since the first, by Horatio Brown, in 1893. Once his books had established him as a cultural historian, Peter began to make his living as a lecturer for upper-echelon tours of Italy and Eastern Europe. His roster of blue-ribbon clients included museum trustees, groups of academic specialists, and wealthy individuals in search of an expert guide. Peter was a man of somewhat formal demeanor, I was told, but dynamic.
It was Rose who had answered the telephone when I called about the apartment
Because, despite its miles of tangled streets and canals, Venice was a lot smaller and more manageable than it seemed at first. At eighteen hundred acres, in fact, Venice was barely twice the size of Central Park.
Because I had always found the sound of church bells pealing every fifteen minutes—close at hand and distant, solo and in concert, each with its own persona—a tonic to the ears and nerves.
Because I could not imagine a more enticing beat to assign myself for an indefinite period of time.
And because, if the worst-case scenario for the rising sea level were to be believed, Venice might not be there very long.
{3}
AT WATER LEVEL
I TOOK AN APARTMENT IN CANNAREGIO, a residential quarter sufficiently removed from the main tourist thoroughfare that it still retained its old neighborhood atmosphere: housewives shopping at the open-air food market, children playing in the squares, the Venetian dialect making a lilting singsong of the spoken word. Footsteps and voices were, in fact, the dominant sounds in Venice, since there were no cars to drown them out and very little vegetation to absorb them. Voices carried with startling clarity through the stone-paved squares and alleys. A few fleeting words spoken in the house across the calle sounded surprisingly close, as if they had been uttered by someone in the same room. In the early evenings, people gathered in clusters to gossip in Strada Nuova, the main street of Cannaregio, and the sound of their mingled conversations rose in the air like the buzz of a cocktail party in a large room.
My apartment occupied part of the ground floor of Palazzo da Silva, which had been the British embassy in the seventeenth century. It was just outside the Ghetto, the five-hundred-year-old Jewish quarter, which, as the world’s first ghetto, gave its name to all future ghettos. My new home had three rooms with marble floors, beamed ceilings, and a view of the Misericordia Canal, which flowed along the side of the building like a moat, lapping at the stones ten feet below my window.
On the far side of the canal, the foot traffic along the walk in front of a row of small shops was as peaceful as that of a country lane. The canal itself was a narrow, lightly traveled backwater. Boats passed just often enough to keep the water churning and splashing appealingly. At high tide, traffic was visible above the windowsill, and the boatmen’s voices rang clear and close at hand. As the tide lowered, the men and their boats slipped out of sight, like window washers on a descending scaffold. Their voices receded and acquired an echo as the canal became a deepening trench. Then the tide came in again and lifted the men and boats back into view.
My landlords, Peter and Rose Lauritzen, lived two floors above, on the main floor of the palace, the piano nobile. Peter was American, Rose was English; they had lived in Venice for nearly thirty years. I called them at the suggestion of friends who said they were agreeable people, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Venice, and might have a small guest apartment available in their building.
Peter Lauritzen had written four well-regarded books about Venice, concerning its history, its art, its architecture, and efforts at preservation. His history of Venice, published in 1978, was one of the few to have been written in English since the first, by Horatio Brown, in 1893. Once his books had established him as a cultural historian, Peter began to make his living as a lecturer for upper-echelon tours of Italy and Eastern Europe. His roster of blue-ribbon clients included museum trustees, groups of academic specialists, and wealthy individuals in search of an expert guide. Peter was a man of somewhat formal demeanor, I was told, but dynamic.
It was Rose who had answered the telephone when I called about the apartment
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