That Venice has a pact with the devil is something that all the locals know. They don’t proclaim it to the rooftops but they keep it in mind every time they cross the famous Rialto Bridge, one of the city’s greatest emblems. Legend has it that the evil one appeared to his architect, Antonio da Ponte, to warn him that he could only finish it if he, in return, gave him the soul of the first living being to cross it. Ingenious, the builder bought a rooster to release it on the day of the inauguration with such bad luck that the trick reached the ears of the devil and from then on everything is misfortune”, recounts Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (Vitoria, 1972) from that same bridge. that rescues this and other Venetian stories, and fictionalizes a few more, in El ángel de la ciudad, recently arrived in bookstores thanks to Planeta and, at the beginning of April, also available in Catalan with Columna.
The author regrets that the legends are lost in oblivion in the face of the increasingly evident exodus of Venetians. In the San Marco sestiere, the Morelli pharmacy is in charge of daily remembering this fatality. There, in addition to medicines, it is announced on a small screen how many Venetians currently live in the city. As of today, a total of 49,626. An overwhelming figure if one takes into account that just after the Second World War, nearly 175,000 came to reside. With the purpose of preserving popular narratives and expanding them beyond its borders, the winner of the Planeta 2020 award once again places Unai López de Ayala, alias Kraken, as the protagonist in the mother city of the European carnival and of characters such as the adventurer Marco Polo or the seductive Casanova. The former inspector decides to lend a hand to the body, suspecting that his mother Ithaca could be involved in a strange case after a palazzo burns down during a meeting of the League of Antiquarian Booksellers. At the same time, in Vitoria, Estíbaliz investigates a case that may hold the keys to the robbery that ended the life of his father.
“Past and present are forced to face each other”, advances the author, who assures that what was clear to her that she was going to write “a thriller that would have to do with the forgery of works of art”. He finished deciding when he found the ideal place to locate Ithaca’s home in the Italian city: a small house next to the Ponte dell’Accademia, from which you can see the Guggenheim, where The Angel of the City, the sculpture by Marino Marini, remains. which gives the book its name. “It is in the garden and can be seen from the Grand Canal. He is a rider on his horse showing his penis, which is now attached but in his day it could be unscrewed and made bigger. The nuns who saw it while sailing were scandalized”. The museum is another of the book’s key settings, as it is there that the writer combines El Ángelus, by Millet, with the different versions that Salvador Dalí made of this painting.
Another place that the writer did not want to stop describing in her pages is the Acqua Alta bookstore, considered one of the most beautiful in the world and where the books rest in gondolas. A solution that she took the bookseller Luigi Frizzo, also present in the novel with another name, after part of his goods got wet from the rise of the water. She “she left some books in the patio and over time, they hardened, which allowed her to create some original stairs, one of her main claims to this day. From all the bad, the Venetians always get something good ”, she concludes.
