In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking 'suicide' prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur the master glassblower of Venice and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.īerendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to reveal a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire.

The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. Its architectural treasures crumble-foundations shift, marble ornaments fall-even as efforts to preserve them are underway. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the 'magic, mystery, and decadence' of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.

The city of falling angels review