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bigger than the houses in his neighborhood near Tulane. It was ironic that the relatively small, run-down building was called the Palazzo Uccello while a much more impressive building next door was simply the Casa Maddalena.
    During his weeks in Venice the city worked its magic on him. Where others have loved Venice but felt alienated from it, as if they have wandered into a world that can never be theirs, Urbino had loved it almost immediately as the home he had been waiting for. He had seen it in innumerable photographs, paintings, and movies, read about it in stories and poems and travel accounts, yet when he had seen the real thing he hadn’t been disappointed. The city exceeded his expectations.
    It is questionable, however, whether Venice would have had such an impact on him if he hadn’t, at a more impressionable age, read the book the Contessa had been chiding him about, the book that—he had never dared tell her—was said to have corrupted Dorian Gray. He had found an old, illustrated edition of the French novel in a dusty bookshop in the French Quarter. This story of a neurotic aristocrat who retires to his mansion outside Paris to lead a self-contained, eccentric life of the mind and senses had grabbed hold of Urbino. At the age of seventeen, when most other boys are thinking about a life of commitment, Urbino dreamed instead of one that would bring him seclusion on his own terms.
    He had copied out several passages from the novel into a notebook and then illustrated them. One of his favorites was the description of Des Esseintes’s fantasy of a special domicile for himself:
    Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all the modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.
    Ten years later, when he had come to Venice to inherit the Palazzo Uccello, he realized that to live in a palazzo, however small, in this museum city would be to go Des Esseintes one better. In fact, like Urbino’s own watercolor illustration for the passage—a gleaming boatlike building—the palazzi lined up on either side of the Grand Canal resembled ornate ships brought to permanent berth.
    The decision to commit himself to the city had come suddenly. Walking through the damp and moldy pianterreno of the Palazzo Uccello the day before he was scheduled to leave, he had told the agente immobiliare with him that he didn’t want to put the building up for sale after all. He would keep it. He would make it his home.
    The only way he could finance the needed repairs was to sell the house in New Orleans. For almost a year he lived in one room at a pensione near the train station while the work was being done.
    When he eventually moved in, it was with considerable excitement and not a little nervousness. All the income from his books, supplemented by the inheritance from his parents, had to go into the upkeep. Although it was difficult, he had never regretted his decision.
    The Palazzo Uccello was, he liked to think, a delightful ark within the greater ark that was Venice. Behind its walls he was far away from the crowds yet close enough to the flow of life to make him feel snug in his solitude.
    On this late afternoon, however, despite the attractions of the Palazzo Uccello, he didn’t turn down the Mercerie but went through the Piazzetta past the column with the winged lion to the Molo San Marco. He stood at the balustrade in front of the Royal Gardens, deserted now of painters and souvenir sellers. Only one other person was there, a thin old man beneath a battered umbrella standing next to the telescope and staring off toward the low line of the Lido.
    With the broad expanse of the lagoon stretching from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Giudecca, Urbino felt as if he were on the deck of a ship. The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore with its classical brick facade and tall bell tower floated