La Fenice Gossip

So, who here has read The City Of Falling Angels by John Berendt? I ask because it starts with the burning of La Fenice and moves onto some horrific corruption and scandal, made just about readable by Berendt's gossipy style. (SUCH a Venticello.) What happened to the elderly Olga Rudge, owner of Ezra Pound's estate, will have you gasping aloud in disgust.

Recommended, naturally.

I haven't, but I want to! I've heard good and bad about it, and want to make up my own mind. I'm hoping to get to Venice in February, and am making a stack of books about the city to read.

I can't see what's bad about CITY, I really can't. Except if you happened to be the people who did the bad things to Olga Rudge, of course. THEN you might not much like Berendt's laying your crimes bare for all to see *cough*

Re your reading list, have you seen this excellent webpage "fictionalcities"?

http://www.fictionalcities.co.uk/venice.htm

Oooooh! Thanks so much! That site is bookmarked. Of course, even if I did nothing but read between now and February, with minimal time for sleeping and eating, I'd never read all those books! But I can try.

Ooh, I'm probably too late, but I'd recommend Hugo Pratt's "Favola di Venezia: Sirat-al-Bunduqqiyah". He was a native, and captured more in one frame of his BD than others do in a hundred written pages .