face.
People walking along the quayside paused to look up, too, wondering what the commotion was about. All they could see was a peaceful daytime sky. How could they know that Capitano Mario Moro was reliving his imagined heroics of the night the Fenice burned—sending signals to a helicopter pilot who acknowledged his command with a crisp salute, then banked into a steep descent, skimmed the surface of the Grand Canal, and scooped up another tankful of water.
MY CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH MARIO MORO happened while I was on my way to see a man who had piqued my curiosity earlier in the week by giving a newspaper interview in which he lambasted the management of the Venice Film Festival as “corrupt petty officials, who chose lousy little flavor-of-the-month films to compete for awards over bigger, quality movies.”
The man could not be dismissed as a mere crank, because he was Count Giovanni Volpi, the son of the festival’s founder—Count Giuseppe Volpi—and every year he provided the Volpi Cups that were presented to the best actor and best actress. As it happened, the film festival was only one of many targets of Giovanni Volpi’s rage. He was angry at all of Venice.
Chief among Volpi’s grievances was the posthumous condemnation of his father, which Giovanni considered flagrantly unjust. Despite what people thought about the late Giuseppe Volpi, it was generally conceded that he was the most significant Venetian of the twentieth century, and the film festival was among the least of his achievements.
Giuseppe Volpi brought electric power to Venice, northeast Italy, and most of the Balkans in 1903. He conceived of and built the mainland port city of Marghera. He widened the railroad bridge to the mainland, making it possible for cars and trucks to reach Piazzale Roma in Venice. He restored a shabby old palace on the Grand Canal and turned it into the world-famous Gritti Hotel; then he bought five-star hotels throughout Italy, creating a monopoly and founding the luxury hotel chain CIGA. He was instrumental in creating the Correr Museum in St. Mark’s Square. He negotiated the Turkish-Italian peace treaty of 1912, which gave Libya and the island of Rhodes to Italy, and he later served as Libya’s governor. He mediated the payment of Italy’s debt to the United States and Great Britain after World War I, on extremely favorable terms for Italy. He attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as a member of the Italian delegation, and he later became Mussolini’s finance minister.
For most of his career, Giuseppe Volpi was popularly known, in person and in the press, by the nickname “the Last Doge of Venice.” But now, fifty years later, he was primarily remembered as being a high-ranking member of the Fascist regime. He was regarded in Venice with ambivalence at best, and this is what most infuriated his son.
Giovanni Volpi’s comments about the film festival made him a topic of conversation for a few days, and I learned the outline of his story.
He had been born out of wedlock in 1938 to Giuseppe Volpi and his mistress, Nathalie LaCloche, a French Algerian, a pied-noir— blond, brilliant, and beautiful. Giuseppe, who was married and the father of two adult daughters, legitimized Giovanni’s birth by arranging to have the government pass a law that was wiped off the books as soon as it served its purpose. Four years later, in 1942, Count Volpi’s wife died, and he married Nathalie LaCloche. They lived most of the time in Volpi’s huge palace in Rome and spent summers in a villa on the Giudecca.
Toward the end of the war, the Germans captured Volpi and injected him with powerful chemicals to try to make him talk but succeeded only in destroying his health. He died in Rome in 1947 at the age of seventy, leaving the nine-year-old Giovanni a vast estate that included the seventy-five-room Palazzo Volpi on the Grand Canal, a
People walking along the quayside paused to look up, too, wondering what the commotion was about. All they could see was a peaceful daytime sky. How could they know that Capitano Mario Moro was reliving his imagined heroics of the night the Fenice burned—sending signals to a helicopter pilot who acknowledged his command with a crisp salute, then banked into a steep descent, skimmed the surface of the Grand Canal, and scooped up another tankful of water.
MY CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH MARIO MORO happened while I was on my way to see a man who had piqued my curiosity earlier in the week by giving a newspaper interview in which he lambasted the management of the Venice Film Festival as “corrupt petty officials, who chose lousy little flavor-of-the-month films to compete for awards over bigger, quality movies.”
The man could not be dismissed as a mere crank, because he was Count Giovanni Volpi, the son of the festival’s founder—Count Giuseppe Volpi—and every year he provided the Volpi Cups that were presented to the best actor and best actress. As it happened, the film festival was only one of many targets of Giovanni Volpi’s rage. He was angry at all of Venice.
Chief among Volpi’s grievances was the posthumous condemnation of his father, which Giovanni considered flagrantly unjust. Despite what people thought about the late Giuseppe Volpi, it was generally conceded that he was the most significant Venetian of the twentieth century, and the film festival was among the least of his achievements.
Giuseppe Volpi brought electric power to Venice, northeast Italy, and most of the Balkans in 1903. He conceived of and built the mainland port city of Marghera. He widened the railroad bridge to the mainland, making it possible for cars and trucks to reach Piazzale Roma in Venice. He restored a shabby old palace on the Grand Canal and turned it into the world-famous Gritti Hotel; then he bought five-star hotels throughout Italy, creating a monopoly and founding the luxury hotel chain CIGA. He was instrumental in creating the Correr Museum in St. Mark’s Square. He negotiated the Turkish-Italian peace treaty of 1912, which gave Libya and the island of Rhodes to Italy, and he later served as Libya’s governor. He mediated the payment of Italy’s debt to the United States and Great Britain after World War I, on extremely favorable terms for Italy. He attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as a member of the Italian delegation, and he later became Mussolini’s finance minister.
For most of his career, Giuseppe Volpi was popularly known, in person and in the press, by the nickname “the Last Doge of Venice.” But now, fifty years later, he was primarily remembered as being a high-ranking member of the Fascist regime. He was regarded in Venice with ambivalence at best, and this is what most infuriated his son.
Giovanni Volpi’s comments about the film festival made him a topic of conversation for a few days, and I learned the outline of his story.
He had been born out of wedlock in 1938 to Giuseppe Volpi and his mistress, Nathalie LaCloche, a French Algerian, a pied-noir— blond, brilliant, and beautiful. Giuseppe, who was married and the father of two adult daughters, legitimized Giovanni’s birth by arranging to have the government pass a law that was wiped off the books as soon as it served its purpose. Four years later, in 1942, Count Volpi’s wife died, and he married Nathalie LaCloche. They lived most of the time in Volpi’s huge palace in Rome and spent summers in a villa on the Giudecca.
Toward the end of the war, the Germans captured Volpi and injected him with powerful chemicals to try to make him talk but succeeded only in destroying his health. He died in Rome in 1947 at the age of seventy, leaving the nine-year-old Giovanni a vast estate that included the seventy-five-room Palazzo Volpi on the Grand Canal, a
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