"City of Falling Angels"

All my notes were made in the first half of the book. One can't avoid comparing this to John Berendt's previous effort, and I'd say it's lesser.

Venice's quirks:

• Kidnaps are rare because it's hard to get away - all major routes can be easily sealed off;
• Oil tankers displace so much water as they passed by that they sucked water out of the little side canals. 
• There are no fire hydrants in the city.
• Pigeons stink because they use their own excrement to build their nest - like penguins. People tried mixing food with birth-control chemicals, but the pigeon population only increased.
• Mask shops became a detested symbol of the city's capitulation to tourism at the expense of its livability.

Giuseppe Volpi: brought electric power to Venice, northeast Italy, and most of the Balkans in 1903; legitimized his son by his mistress by arranging to have the government pass a law that was wiped off the books as soon it served its purpose.
Peggy Guggenheim: Hers was the last private gondola in Venice.
Signor Donadon: Olive oil, pasta, honey, espresso, green-apple juice, and Nutella makes up his Italian rat poison, because it has to be more appetizing than garbage.

Italy:
__ There's one company for every eight inhabitants.
__ The penal code is still the one set up by Mussolini. There have been fifty or sixty governments in Italy since the
Second World War, and none has been in power long enough to effect a change.
__ ... existence of a covert, high-level paramilitary army, code-named Gladio, that had been set up and financed by the American CIA in 1956 for the purpose of waging guerrilla warfare in case the Soviet Union ever invaded Italy. It staged terrorist attacks within Italy, with the intention of implicating domestic political parties on the left. Gladio had taken part in no fewer than three abortive attempts to overthrow the legit- imate government of Italy-in 1964, 1969, and 1973. Similar Gladio-type secret armies existed in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece.