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Ludovico De Luigi’s painting, and spontaneous donations. In answer to a question about the money, Guthrie could be heard to say, “No, no! Certainly not. We won’t hand the money over to Venice until the restoration starts. Are you kidding? We’re not that stupid. We’ll keep it in escrow till then. Otherwise, there’s no telling whose pocket it might end up in.”
     
     
     
 
BY 3:00 A.M., THE FIRE WAS FINALLY DECLARED UNDER control. There had been no secondary fires, despite the flying debris, and no one had been seriously hurt. The Fenice’s thick walls had contained the blaze, preventing the fire from spreading, while incinerating everything inside. Instead of destroying Venice, the Fenice had, in a sense, committed suicide.
     
     
    At 4:00 A.M., the helicopter made its last overhead pass. The Fenice’s sad fate was written in the leaky hoses snaking through Campo Santa Maria del Giglio from the Grand Canal to the Fenice.
     
     
    Mayor Massimo Cacciari was still standing in Campo San Fantin in front of the Fenice, looking glumly at what was left of the opera house. A perfectly preserved poster, enclosed in a glass case mounted on a wall by the entrance, announced that a Woody Allen jazz concert would reopen the renovated opera house at the end of the month.
     
     
    At 5:00 A.M., Archimede Seguso opened his eyes and sat up in bed, refreshed despite having slept only three hours. He went to the window and opened the shutters. The firemen had set up floodlights and trained their hoses on the gutted interior. Billowing smoke rose from the Fenice’s shell.
     
     
    Signor Seguso dressed by the light reflected from the Fenice’s floodlit walls. The air was thick with the smell of charred wood, but he could smell the coffee his wife was brewing for him. As always, she was standing by the door waiting for him with a steaming cup, and, as always, he stood there with her and drank it. Then he kissed her on both cheeks, put his gray fedora on his head, and went downstairs. He paused for a moment in front of the house, looking up at the Fenice. The windows were gaping holes framing a view of the dark, predawn sky. A strong wind whipped around the dismal shell. It was a cold wind from the north, a bora. If it had been blowing eight hours earlier, the fire would certainly have spread.
     
     
    A young fireman was leaning against the wall, exhausted. He nodded as Signor Seguso approached.
     
     
    “We lost it,” the fireman said.
     
     
    “You did all you could,” Signor Seguso replied gently. “It was hopeless.”
     
     
    The fireman shook his head and looked up at the Fenice. “Every time a piece of that ceiling fell, a piece of my heart fell with it.”
     
     
    “Mine, too,” said Signor Seguso, “but you must not blame yourself.”
     
     
    “It will always haunt me that we couldn’t save it.”
     
     
    “Look around you,” Signor Seguso said. “You saved Venice.”
     
     
    With that the old man turned and set off slowly down Calle Caotorta on his way to Fondamente Nuove, where he would take the vaporetto, or water bus, to his glassworks factory in Murano. When he was younger, the mile-long walk to the vaporetto had taken him twelve minutes. Now it took an hour.
     
     
    In Campo Saint ’Angelo, he turned and looked back. A wide, spiraling column of smoke, floodlit from beneath, rose like a lurid specter against the sky.
     
     
    At the far side of the campo, he entered the shopping street, Calle de la Mandola, where he encountered a man in a blue workman’s jumper washing the windows of the pastry shop. Window washers were the only people who were at work at that early hour, and they always greeted him as he walked by.
     
     
    “Ah, maestro!” said the man in blue. “We were worried about you last night, living so close to the Fenice.”
     
     
    “You’re very kind,” said Signor Seguso, bowing slightly and touching the brim of his hat, “but we were never really in any danger, thank