Citizens of Savannah

When John Berendt decided to write a book about Savannah, he told the story of an entire city through the lens of eccentrics and outlandish characters in the orbit of a murder case.

Citizens of Savannah may have complained, but the approach worked so well that "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" spent a record 216 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

In Venice -- a city living, brawling and loving atop 1,200 years of human foibles, the technique makes even more sense. In "The City of Falling Angels," the June Buffalo News Book of the Month, Berendt again coils his story around a great crime.

In January 1996, La Fenice Opera House, a 175-year-old Venice landmark where five of Verdi's operas premiered, was gutted by fire. Three days later, "the air still smelled of charcoal" when Berendt arrived.

Over nearly 400 pages that follow, the author introduces readers to a dozen characters, families and situations that he follows for a chapter as the investigation and civic argument over the Fenice fire rage in the background.

We meet "Venice's leading artist provocateur," Ludovico De Luigi, who calls the fire and its aftermath a perfect slice of Venetian life in a monologue that echoes many of the book's episodes:

"Look what the story offers: a great fire, a cultural calamity, the spectacle of public officials blaming each other, an unseemly rush for the money to rebuild the theater, the satisfaction of a trial with guilty verdicts and jail sentences, the pride of the Fenice's rebirth and an unsolved mystery. Money secretly changing hands. Unnamed culprits hiding in the shadows. It stimulates the imagination, gives people the freedom to make up any scenario they want. What more could anyone ask?"

We meet Archimede Seguso, the patriarch of the 21st generation of a family of Venetian glassmakers, who has a ringside seat on the destruction of the theater, as he waits on his rooftop with a bucket of water to quench flying embers.

Later, in his workshop, the artisan uses all of his skills to portray the night of the inferno in a series of vases still treasured today -- though they're gathering dust as his sons fight over his estate.

There's the tale of Philip and Jane Rylands, a couple who managed to persuade an American heiress to sell the estate of poet Ezra Pound, who ended his long and eventful life in Venice.

To embody the war between man and nature, we meet a cook whose product is talked about around the world -- because it kills rats. Meet Massimo Donadon, the "Rat Man of Treviso," who says he uses curry powder in the rat poison for customers in India and butter to kill the French rodents.

Even if you've begun the book knowing nothing of Venice, you run a substantial risk of becoming enthralled by the end.

How could you not be intrigued by a place where you come across a predawn scene of men netting flocks of pigeons and hustling them away? Inquiring, the author finds that the men are an official, illegal, pigeon reduction squad.

Venice has too many pigeons, which even the Venetian mayor calls the "rats of the sky." But the animal rights activists won't allow an all-out assault.

The smart thing to do would be to limit the pigeons' food supply. But the pigeon-feed vendors in St. Mark's Square sell so many bags of pigeon feed to tourists that all eight of them can pay the equivalent of $150,000 a year to City Hall as a "licensing fee."

How absurd, the author ventures to Venice's "director of animal affairs," Dr. Mario Scattolin.

"It's worse than absurd," said Dr. Scattolin. "It's contradictory, hypocritical, irresponsible, dangerous, dishonest, corrupt, unfair and completely mad." He leaned back in his chair. "Welcome to Venice."