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By Dana Thomas
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When Paolo Costa became mayor of Venice three years ago, he asked his advisers two questions: "When will La Fenice be finished? And how much will it cost?" He had good reason to wonder. After the legendary 18th-century opera house burned to the ground in January 1996, the then mayor swore on the smoldering embers that La Fenice, like its namesake phoenix, would rise from the ashes. But as recently as last year it was still a smoky, scarred hole in the center of the city. "I found it was impossible to travel outside of Venice and not be asked about La Fenice," Costa recalls. Everywhere he went, people begged him to restore the historic theater--but expressed worries that it would never happen. "The image was that Venice wasn't working anymore, that the basic fabric of our society was collapsing," he says. "La Fenice had become a symbol for all this. We had to do something--and fast."
He did. Next month La Fenice will reopen with a weeklong series of inaugural concerts, including performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and part-time Venice resident Elton John. Guests will enter into a pink marble foyer and watch performances from gilded wooden boxes under a sweeping ceiling mural of cherubim and seraphim--all appearing just as it did before the inferno. During intermission, they can stroll in the refurbished grand oak-parquet ballroom. What fans won't see--but will definitely notice--is the new state-of-the-art sound and staging equipment, central air conditioning and heating, and a fire-extinguishing system supplied by a reservoir underneath the theater. "If you light a match in La Fenice now, you will be drowned in water," Costa says.
Call it il miracolo. Four years ago, when NEWSWEEK visited the ruins and saw a roofless shell with pigeons flying through the charred remains, it seemed the theater would never reopen--much less by the target date of Christmas 2001. Ever since two electricians deliberately set the fire to avoid paying a fine for delinquent repairs, La Fenice has been trapped in a swirl of bureaucracy, lawsuits over who should get the 60 million euro contract and plain bad luck. By early 2000 work was underway, but at a staggeringly slow pace. When Costa, a former Public Works minister and university professor, became mayor in May 2000, he reviewed the situation: the contractor had completed only 6 percent of the work in 60 percent of the allotted time. "It was a mess, a disaster," Costa recalls. "I wondered, 'Can we tell the public we have to start again?' But I realized that if I didn't, it was going to be an endless story."
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Costa took the unprecedented move of asking the city's prefect to name him commissioner of La Fenice restoration and personally took over the project. He sacked the contractor, a German company called Holzmann Construction, launched a new bidding competition and awarded the project to a local firm. Five teams of masons, electricians and artisans set to work at once. Much of the new theater was built off site and kept on a barge in the Grand Canal, ferried in on smaller boats when needed. The baroque moldings and appliques were manufactured by artisans in nearby towns, screwed into place and then gilded and painted. The ceiling mural, paid for by the Save Venice fund, was painted on a canvas in Rome and applied directly to the plaster. Scorched sections of the old theater's marble and moldings remain scattered throughout as a memorial to the fire.
Following the inauguration and a New Year's concert gala, the theater will close for a few weeks for technical and acoustic fine-tuning, then reopen to host a series of concerts through the spring. Next fall the new Fenice will mount its first opera production, Verdi's "La Traviata"--a work that premiered there in 1853--to be conducted by Lorin Maazel of the New York Philharmonic. As La Fenice's director, Giampaolo Vianello, notes, "You're not a real opera house until you've staged an opera."
Finishing La Fenice is merely the first of Costa's big schemes for Venice. Next he plans to tackle the Moses Project, a complicated system of floodgates designed to tame the Adriatic's increasingly high tides, which frequently flood not only St. Mark's Square but the entire city. If the Moses Project is successful, Costa may even pursue his idea of building a subway system in Venice. "With the opening of La Fenice we hope there will be a real momentum, that everyone will say, 'Maybe we can do something in this very old city'," says Costa. Perhaps Venice, too, is on the verge of a rebirth.
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