Shortly before nine o'clock, Archimede Seguso sat down at the dinner table and unfolded his napkin. Before joining him, his wife went into the living room to lower the curtains, which was her long-standing evening ritual. Signora Seguso knew very well that no one could see in through the windows, but it was her way of enfolding her family in a domestic embrace. The Segusos lived on the third floor of Ca' Capello, a sixteenth-century house in the heart of Venice. A narrow canal wrapped around two sides of the building before flowing into the Grand Canal a short distance away.
Signor Seguso waited patiently at the table. He was eighty-six-tall, thin, his posture still erect. A fringe of wispy white hair and flaring eyebrows gave him the look of a kindly sorcerer, full of wonder and surprise. He had an animated face and sparkling eyes that captivated everyone who met him. If you happened to be in his presence for any length of time, however, your eye would eventually be drawn to his hands.
They were large, muscular hands, the hands of an artisan whose work demanded physical strength. For seventy-five years, Signor Seguso had stood in front of a blazing-hot glassworks furnace - ten, twelve, eighteen hours a day - holding a heavy steel pipe in his hands, turning it to prevent the dollop of molten glass at the other end from drooping to one side or the other, pausing to blow into it to inflate the glass, then laying it across his workbench, still turning it with his left hand while, with a pair of tongs in his right hand, pulling, pinching, and coaxing the glass into the shape of graceful vases, bowls, and goblets.
After all those years of turning the steel pipe hour after hour, Signor Seguso's left hand had molded itself around the pipe until it became permanently cupped, as if the pipe were always in it. His cupped hand was the proud mark of his craft, and this was why the artist who painted his portrait some years ago had taken particular care to show the curve in his left hand.
Men in the Seguso family had been glassmakers since the fourteenth century. Archimede was the twenty-first generation and one of the greatest of them all. He could sculpt heavy pieces out of solid glass and blow vases so thin and fragile they could barely be touched. He was the first glassmaker ever to see his work honored with an exhibition in the Doge's Palace in St. Mark's Square. Tiffany sold his pieces in its Fifth Avenue store.
Archimede Seguso had been making glass since the age of eleven, and by the time he was twenty, he had earned the nickname "Mago del Fuoco" (Wizard of Fire). He no longer had the stamina to stand in front of a hot and howling furnace eighteen hours a day, but he worked every day nonetheless, and with undiminished pleasure. On this particular day, in fact, he had risen at his usual hour of 4:30 A.M., convinced as always that the pieces he was about to make would be more beautiful than any he had ever made before.
In the living room, Signora Seguso paused to look out the window before lowering the curtain. She noticed that the air had become hazy, and she mused aloud that a winter fog had set in. In response, Signor Seguso remarked from the other room that it must have come in very quickly, because he had seen the quarter moon in a clear sky only a few minutes before.
The living room window looked across a small canal at the back of the Fenice Opera House, thirty feet away. Rising above it in the distance, some one hundred yards away, the theater's grand entrance wing appeared to be shrouded in mist. Just as she started to lower the curtain, Signora Seguso saw a flash. She thought it was lightning. Then she saw another flash, and this time she knew it was fire.
"Papa!" she cried out. "The Fenice is on fire!"
*
Signor Seguso stood silently at his bedroom window, watching as the flames raced across the entire top floor of the entrance wing. He knew that, for all its storied loveliness, the Fenice was at this moment an enormous pile of exquisite kindling. Inside a thick shell of Istrian stone lined with brick, the structure was made entirely of wood - wooden beams, wooden floors, wooden walls - richly embellished with wood carvings, sculpted stucco, and papier-mâché, all of it covered with layer upon layer of lacquer and gilt. Signor Seguso was aware, too, that the scenery workshop just across the canal from his house was stocked with solvents and, most worrisome of all, cylinders of propane gas that were used for welding and soldering.
Signora Seguso came back into the room to say she had finally spoken with the police.
"They already knew about the fire," she said. "They told me we should leave the house at once." She looked over her husband's shoulder and stifled a scream; the flames had moved closer in the short time she had been away from the window. They were now advancing through the four smaller reception halls toward the main body of the theater, in their direction.
Archimede Seguso stared into the fire with an appraising eye. He opened the window, and a gust of bitter-cold air rushed in. The wind was blowing to the southwest. The Segusos were due west of the theater, however, and Signor Seguso calculated that if the wind did not change direction or pick up strength, the fire would advance toward the other side of the Fenice rather than in their direction.
"Now, Nandina," he said softly, "stay calm. We're not in any danger."
The Segusos' house was only one of many buildings close to the Fenice. Except for Campo San Fantin, a small plaza at the front of the theater, the Fenice was hemmed in by old and equally flammable buildings, many of them attached to it or separated from it by only four or five feet. This was not at all unusual in Venice, where building space had always been at a premium. Seen from above, Venice resembled a jigsaw puzzle of terra-cotta rooftops. Passages between some of the buildings were so narrow one could not walk through them with an open umbrella. It had become a specialty of Venetian burglars to escape from the scene of a crime by leaping from roof to roof. If the fire in the Fenice were able to make the same sort of leap, it would almost certainly destroy a sizable swath of Venice.
The Fenice itself was dark. It had been closed five months for renovations and was due to reopen in a month. The canal along its rear façade was also closed - empty - having been sealed off and drained so work crews could dredge the silt and sludge from it and repair its walls for the first time in forty years. The canal between the Segusos' building and the back of the Fenice was now a deep, muddy gulch with a tangle of exposed pipes and a few pieces of heavy machinery sitting in puddles at the bottom. The empty canal would make it impossible for fireboats to reach the Fenice, and, worse than that, it would deprive them of a source of water. Venetian firemen depended on water pumped directly from the canals to put out fires. The city had no system of fire hydrants.
Two fireboats managed to navigate to a water-filled canal a short distance from the Fenice. Their hoses were not long enough to reach around the intervening buildings, however, so the firemen dragged them through the kitchen window at the back of the Antico Martini and out through the dining room into Campo San Fantin. They aimed their nozzles at flames burning furiously in a top-floor window of the theater, but the water pressure was too low. The arc of water barely reached the windowsill. The fire went on leaping and taunting and sucking up great turbulent currents of air that set the flames snapping like brilliant red sails in a violent wind.
Several policemen struggled with the massive front door of the Fenice, but to no avail. One of them drew his pistol and fired three shots at the lock. The door opened. Two firemen rushed in and disappeared into a dense white wall of smoke. Moments later they came running out. "It's too late," said one. "It's burning like straw."
The wail of sirens now filled the air as police and firemen raced up and down the Grand Canal in motorboats, spanking up huge butterfly wings of spray as they bounced through the wakes of other boats. About an hour after the first alarm, the city's big fire launch pulled up at the landing stage behind Haig's Bar. Its high-powered rigs would at last be able to pump water the two hundred yards from the Grand Canal to the Fenice. Dozens of firemen ran hoses from the fire launch into Campo Santa Maria del Giglio, feverishly coupling sections together, but it was immediately apparent that the hoses were of different gauges. Leaks sprayed from the couplings, but the firemen carried the linked hoses, such as they were, up to the rooftops around the Fenice anyway. They directed half the water onto the theater in an attempt to contain the fire and the rest of it onto adjacent buildings. Fire Commandant Alfio Pini had already made a momentous strategic decision: The Fenice was lost; save the city.
From The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt. Copyright John Berendt 2005. All rights reserved.
*
Venice's La Fenice Opera House is Restored to Its Former Glory
Guardian Unlimited Published: 12/6/2003
After almost eight years since a fire burnt it to the ground, Venice's La Fenice opera house has been lovingly restored to its former glory.
The only music issuing yesterday through the green and gold wrought iron gates of La Fenice opera house was made by an outsized circular saw that had been set up in the foyer. At the stage door, men in hard hats strode to and fro as women with clipboards conferred earnestly. In a room off to one side, electricians were peering into steel cupboards, cradling wiring diagrams so immense they had to be bound as books. In the passageways beyond, there were "wet paint" and "live wire" warning signs galore.
But up some stairs covered with protective polystyrene, was an explosion of gold. What you find yourself looking at in Venice's newly restored opera house is something quite unique - a theatre almost exactly as it would have been seen by prosperous burghers in the early 19th century. The gilded mouldings have an improbable brilliance. The deep pink plush of the seats is unsullied. The cherubs which disport themselves on the framed panels in front of the boxes have eyes as clear as newborn babies.
Standing amid the charred rubble on the morning of January 30 1996, the then mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, pledged that La Fenice would be rebuilt "com'era, dov'era" (as it was, where it was). And, within the bounds of the possible and desirable, that is exactly what has been done. Mr Cacciari's pledge, of course, begged many questions, not the least of which was "what is was?" La Fenice has been burnt down no fewer than three times and modified in numerous ways since the last reconstruction in 1837 by the Meduna brothers.
"In the end, it was decided to get as close as possible to what they intended," said Gianni Cagnin, the director of works. In some areas, the engineers and architects had to make assumptions, but in others they could restore with absolute certainty. The Venetian company that made the wall fabrics, Rubelli, is still in business and was found to have conserved the patterns used more than a century and a half earlier.
In a week's time, the phoenix is to rise again from the ashes to the strains of Beethoven's The Consecration of the House, conducted by Riccardo Muti. It will be the first in a week-long programme of concerts that is to include a performance by the London Philharmonic. Elton John, who has a house in Venice, is due to give the only solo concert, on December 19.
The theatre will then close for further work. It may reopen in the spring for a series of concerts. But the new Fenice's first opera - Verdi's La Traviata - will not be staged until autumn next year. By then, it will be well over eight years since the fire that reduced the theatre to a gaping ruin.
Two electricians hired to rewire La Fenice were facing the prospect of having to pay penalties because they were behind with their work. So they decided to sprinkle petrol through the 18th century wooden building and burn it down in the hope that nobody would find out. But they did. Earlier this year, Enrico Carella and his cousin, Massimiliano Marchetti, were given six- and seven-year prison sentences.
Work on rebuilding the theatre did not begin in earnest until 18 months after the fire. But, because of a dispute over the award of the contract, it had to be suspended in February 1998. The reconstruction was initially forecast to be completed in 1999. In March 1998 the contract was given to a new company, Holzmann-Romagnoli, which set to with plans drawn up by the architect Aldo Rossi. But between then and the start of reconstruction in June of the following year, Mr Rossi died in a car accident.
By the time Paolo Costa took over as mayor in 2000, the rebuilding programme had missed its initial deadline and there were doubts as to whether it would ever be completed. In 2001, having managed to have himself made commissioner of the project, Mr Costa, a former public works minister, fired Holzmann-Romagnoli and handed over the project to a Venice-based firm, Sacaim, at the head of a consortium that included three other local companies. A new deadline was fixed for late 2003, draconian penalty clauses were imposed and a digital clock was installed at the site to remind everyone that time - and Venice's credibility - was relentlessly ticking away.
In the end, even the revised deadline was missed. It expired last Sunday. But the budget overrun has been surprisingly modest. The final cost of restoring La Fenice is put at €60m (£42m), against Holzmann-Romagnoli's original estimate of €53m (£37m). And, in any case, the difficulties of reconstructing such a building as La Fenice, tucked away in the heart of Venice are not to be underestimated.
Just erecting the site's main crane involved a vast amount of work. It was put up on a bridge at the point where two canals, the Rio de le Veste and the Rio de l'Albero, come together. It had to be supported by four pillars which rested on "micro-poles", made from pre-stressed, reinforced concrete, embedded in the drained canals. Producing cement was another nightmare because there was not enough room at the site itself. The cement was made instead on a pontoon moored in the Grand Canal and pumped to La Fenice through pipes fixed to the bottom of the intervening canals.
As a result of the engineers' ingenuity, the rebuilt theatre will unquestionably be where it was, and, to a large extent, it will be what it was, only better. The reborn La Fenice will have a number of new features: modern stage equipment, new rehearsal space and a reopened canal entrance that will allow theatregoers to arrive by gondola. But will it be as it was? And, in particular, will it sound the same?
"Everything has been done to get back to the same acoustic as before," said Mr Cagnin. Much the same amount of wood has been used in the auditorium. But, perhaps wisely, this time, the roof is steel rather than wood, and that could make an important difference. "Will it be 'com'era'?" Mr Cagnin asked as he stood amid the draped seats. "I think we'll only really find that out when Muti lifts his baton."
Theatre's third reincarnation
Built in 1792 to replace the Teatro San Benedetto, destroyed by fire in 1774, La Fenice means "the phoenix" in Italian
Napoleon visited the 1,500-seat theatre in December 1807, during the French occupation of Venice
The new building closely copies Tommaso and Giambattista Meduna's design, constructed in 1837 after the original opera house burned down
La Fenice staged the first performance of Verdi's Rigoletto in 1851
The premier performance of Verdi's La Traviata, held at La Fenice in 1853, was a disaster. The audience sniggered at the large leading lady supposedly wasting away from consumption
In January 1996 fire destroyed the theatre.
Two electricians were convicted of arson in 2001
Riccardo Muti conducts the first concert when the theatre reopens
