Portrait of hometown Venice

"I very much wanted to do another book, but I was thinking, how will I ever find characters as rich and wonderful as I found in Savannah? Savannah is a uniquely beautiful city that is isolated from everything around it: it is inward-looking, and steeped in ritual and tradition. Venice is also a uniquely beautiful city, isolated geographically and emotionally from the mainland. It is very inward-looking as well--and is certainly steeped in tradition.
"I went back and read Henry James’ Italian novels and Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed. This was not very encouraging. McCarthy says: ’Nothing can be said of Venice, including this statement, that has not already been said before.’ James says: ’It will be a sad day when there is something more to be said about Venice.’
"But he was referring to all the travelogue pieces that were written in the 1880s. What I’m interested in is people who live in Venice. I looked at a list of the novels I have read which we think of as being about Venice--Wings of the Dove, Death in Venice, Don’t Look Now--in every single one of them, the main character just passes through Venice. I’m talking about people involved on a different level from that of tourists.
"There is an American family that came to Venice from Boston in 1880. Old Daniel Curtis bought the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal. They ran a salon and had Manet, Henry James and Edith Wharton come to visit. Four generations later, they’ve just lost the Palazzo, it got to be too expensive. So in the book I go off to the Palazzo with the Curtises at the time they are losing it. It’s very touching.
"One chapter is all about the people I meet as I walk around. There’s a man who goes about carrying plants, looking like a moving shrub. And another who wears different uniforms depending on his mood--a vaporetto conductor, a soldier, a fireman. You see him around town, directing traffic.
"I remembered a sign posted outside the Salute church, years ago when things had not been restored. It said, ’Beware of Falling Angels’. It struck me as the perfect title for the book."
The City of Falling Angels (Sceptre, 27th September, h/b, £30, 0340824980)