The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos,” serialized. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
The peculiar canary-yellow palazzo, just south of the Ponte San Paolo in the center of Venice, belonged to the Family Zanetti and had been occupied by Zanettis since its construction some four hundred years ago.
This was common knowledge in the city. The Zanettis took such pride in their home that, for generations, a resident would regularly sit in one of the upstairs windows, striking up conversations with those who rowed past the building’s distinctive and ostentatious facade.
In this way, the Zanettis served for centuries as garrulous docents at a kind of informal museum. If a gondolier took a detour through this narrow canal to show off the home to a foreign visitor or merchant, a Zanetti would be there, ready to tell the building’s story.
They would first point to the wooden pylons under the house—the alder stilts sunk deep into the mudflats below—and laud the ingenious engineering of their ancestors, the early Venetians. This would lead into a proud soliloquy about the history of Venice, honed through repetition, year after year. They would describe the humble fishermen who first settled the marshes of the Venetian lagoon in the fifth century to escape the marauding Visigoths. Then, other settlers, who came to escape Attila the Hun a century later. And others, escaping the Lombards a century after that.
“These early Venetians lived like seabirds,” the Zanettis would say, cribbing passages from various historical texts, “dispersed across the surface of the lagoon, each with a boat tied outside his door, just as you would have a horse tied outside your home in your city. They were our progenitors: like Moses floating in his basket among the bulrushes, a great historian wrote. But they planted themselves like seeds!”
Gradually, the clots of terra firma those early Venetians occupied were expanded, then lashed together like rafts. The open water between the marshy islands shrank and narrowed into channels.
The Venetians worked heroically, incrementally, seizing the opportunity of each low tide to build up new land with mats of reeds and soil before the water inundated their good works once again. “Always two steps forward, one step back—except when it was also two steps back!” the Zanettis would say with a laugh.
But little by little—plank by plank, pylon by pylon, marble block by marble block, canal by canal—these builders brought a full-fledged metropolis into being, just as God once divided the waters to create the land. And now, here it was: an amphibious city, eight-and-a-half miles wide and 30 miles long. A jigsaw puzzle of 118 islands threaded by 200 interior waterways, connected by more than 400 bridges.
“La Serenissima!” the Zanettis would shout, gesturing dramatically at the glory in all directions: The Most Serene Republic.
“Understand that only in Venice could a home as beautiful as ours exist,” they’d go on, showing off the many opulent carvings and sculptural elements on the palazzo’s facade. These included family crests, emblems of the city’s various professional guilds, and, of course, an enormous winged lion—the symbol of Venice—cast in bronze.
Unlike every other European city, the Zanettis would explain, Venice never had to worry about invaders. Foreigners couldn’t discern the depth and navigability of its waterways; only the local gondolieri fully understood the maze of canals, the rowers who traversed them all day long, and again in their dreams. “The canals,” the Zanettis always said, “are the secret passageways of Venice.”
Consequently, Venice never had to defend itself, never had to scramble around erecting big, hideous walls. The water was its walls. “We did not have to make our city a fortress,” the Zanettis would say, concluding their story. “We were permitted to make it beautiful instead.”
It had been 50 years, however, since anyone in Venice could remember a Zanetti presenting this self-satisfied lecture from the window. The home’s current inhabitants, Damiano Zanetti and his wife Iseppa, did not talk to passersby. They did not talk to anyone. They were aging recluses who kept their windows shuttered and lived a quiet, circumscribed life indoors, attended by a small household staff who were given almost nothing to do.
The Zanetti’s butler mostly looked after the couple’s five small dogs. (He now feared for his job, however. Earlier that night, he’d left the animals momentarily unattended in the palazzo’s courtyard, facing an inlet of the canal, when a violent thunderstorm broke. When he returned, they’d vanished; scared witless, the little dogs had presumably clambered off the edge and drowned.) And the Zanetti’s cook knew to leave the couple’s meals on the kitchen island then disappear until it was time to wash the dishes.
The maid dusted around Damiano and Iseppa in silence, as though they were two more antiquities in the family’s collection. And their gondolier—a chauffeur retained by people who never left home—merely spent every morning polishing the Zanettis’ immaculate black boat on the dock below the house and every afternoon leaning against it, smoking and looking at his phone.
All four workers were at home, asleep in their separate quarters on the second floor on an otherwise unremarkable night in November, when—without explanation—the palazzo suddenly shook.
A single brisk shudder. In the dead of night, in the hours when all of Venice turned silent and still, it was like the building itself was fast asleep, then shivered in the throes of some disturbing dream.
The motion was subtle enough that only the maid woke up. And so she alone heard, through her open window, a series of quick swishing sounds in the canal that followed the vibration: a sharp disruption of the water, different from the sound of any boat.
The palazzo shook a second time.
This shaking was fiercer—unmistakable. It jolted the gondolier and cook awake, though the butler went on snoring. (Wracked with guilt and anxiety about the dogs, he’d consumed a bottle of wine before bed.)
Swish, swish, swish. The sound again, louder.
And then, a devastating thud beneath the house. The building thrust violently to one side.
The maid shrieked. The cook leapt under her doorway. The gondolier reached for the knife under his pillow and the boots under his bed.
On the fourth floor, in the Zanettis’ musty and cluttered bedroom, Damiano started to scream but worked himself into a coughing fit instead. Iseppa sprung upright in their four-poster bed, eyes frozen open in shock. There, on the top floor, the rocking of the structure was so pronounced that it felt like they were on a train, turning hard around a bend.
Something thwacked into the base of the house underwater again—this time, from the other direction.
Shouting and swearing ricocheted around the home. Then another blow—the hardest yet.
The jolts continued and quickened, shoving the structure right, then left, then left again.
Up and down the facade, the palazzo’s wooden shutters slammed open and clapped shut against the building in a kind of psychotic applause. Three broke free of their hinges and fell into the canal. Stucco cracked. Glass shattered. The timbers in the ceilings groaned.
The bombardment continued. The chef was knocked unconscious by a falling shelf. The maid kneeled and prayed. The gondolier burst valiantly into her room to protect her. (They’d made love once, sixteen years ago.) The drunken butler opened his eyes and vomited across his quilt.
In the Zanettis’ bedroom, a large portrait of Damiano’s third-great grandfather plunged off the wall, cracking the ornate tile work on the floor.
Damiano could not stop coughing. Iseppa, still too frightened to move, stared at the spasming walls around her and, her voice quavering with awe as much as fear, whispered: “What’s doing this to us?”
That was when Damiano tugged on the back of Iseppa’s nightgown, gathering her body back beside his in bed. There was nothing they could do but take shelter in each other. They embraced, locked eyes and, just as Damiano opened his mouth to lead them in a prayer, the awful creaking of buckling wood under the house erupted into a riot of crackling and snapping—a racket that would be mistaken for machine gunfire by one of the neighbors.
All at once, the pylons holding up the house gave way, and the palazzo collapsed in on itself.
Everything and everyone inside spilled into the canal, like flesh disgorging from a smooshed piece of fruit.
Many of the nearby buildings were vacant. It was late fall; the homes had been converted into vacation rentals and lay fallow that Tuesday evening when the season was slow. But one older woman living nearby would later tell the Carabinieri that she’d heard screaming in the canal after the collapse. There was so much commotion—so much thrashing and splashing—that the woman assumed there’d been thirty or forty people thrown into the water amid the debris, instead only six.
But these sounds did not last long. By the time this neighbor made it to her window—45 seconds maximum, she claimed—the waves in the water were settling, and the canal had gone perfectly silent again.
She could remember only one sound, she told police: a warbling chorus of strange swishes, like a thousand blades carving the water.
It was growing quieter, moving farther and farther away.
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