“Where did one go when one wished to travel overnight to a unique, fairy-tale-like location? Why, that was obvious.” It was obvious to Thomas Mann, who penned those lines in his classic novel Death in Venice — and it was obvious to me as well. And so I took a couple of days after the Florence training sessions and headed over to Venice, a city I had first visited at the age of 14 – exactly the same age, in fact, as the youthful Tadzio in Mann’s novel. Now, of course, I’m more the graying Aschenbach.

Michael Cunningham has written a very perceptive Introduction to the recent M.H. Heim translation of Mann’s work, and claims that Heim has given us “an Aschenbach who is more clearly and unavoidably all of us, who wants more than life is willing to provide…” He pictures him as Icarus, flying high near the end of the novel — dyeing his hair dark, rouge on his cheeks, and a gaudy striped ribbon in his hat – before crashing & burning on the beach at Lido.

My own Venetian visit was certainly a bit less flamboyant than that (i.e., my hair is still gray, & I didn’t lose that engineer’s sartorial look!). But that quest for beauty and vigor and life-affirming experience burns in all of us — and Venice is particularly adept in bringing it out. I did many of the things that folks usually do when they visit the city: took a walking tour around the old sections, and got lost several times in the narrow maze-like, winding alleyways; marveled at the gold ceiling mosaics in St. Mark’s; took a vaporetto ride the length of the Grand Canal; had a drink at Harry’s Bar; and, yes – I’ll spare you those photos of me riding around in a gondola.

La Fenice

But one of the more interesting attractions was ‘La Fenice’ – the Venetian opera house that was burned to the ground by arsonists in 1996. I had recently read John Berendt’s book The City of Falling Angels, and he described the pre-fire Fenice as “arguably the most beautiful opera house in the world, and one of the most significant.” (It had, for example, premiered Verdi’s La Traviata and Rigoletto). Berendt is better known for his book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and his Venetian book starts off a bit slow….. but it soon gets better as it moves along. ‘La Fenice’ means ‘the Phoenix’ (due to previous rebuilding efforts from fires in 1774 and 1836), and the theater was rebuilt from the ashes this time com’era dov’era (i.e., “as it was, where it was.”) I wanted to check out the new ‘same-as-before’ reconstruction, and found the theater to be absolutely stunning inside. (You can get just a hint about that from La Fenice’s website.)

Faded grandeur alongside stunning beauty — Mann certainly chose the appropriate city for his novel!