The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Vaporetto 13, Robert Girardi

Vaporetto 13

Robert Girardi

Venice is echoing with the voices of all its old ghosts. Beneath the city's exterior beauty -- sun-streaked canals, charming gondolas, and splendid piazzas -- is a world of bone-chilling cold, dank alleyways, and a tradition that marks a Holiday of Death. Cloaks and masks, disguise and intrigue, are a time-honored way of life in this familiar yet unknowable city in which Jack Squire, a currency trader on assignment from Washington, D.C., has taken up residence. On one particular autumn night, swirling with damp mist and moving shadows, Jack finds himself in a campo teeming with stray cats. There he meets Caterina, a woman bearing the sadness of centuries, whose strangeness immediately possesses him and whose past eludes and controls him. "Vaporetto 13" is the relentless and mesmerizing story of one man's search for truth and the haunted city in which he finds it.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Delta
  • Publish Date: Sep 8th, 1998
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.55in - 5.57in - 0.56in - 0.62lb
  • EAN: 9780385319478
  • Categories: LiteraryThrillers - SuspenseRomance - Suspense

About the Author

Robert Girardi was educated at Catholic schools in Europe and at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a recipient of a James Michener Fellowship in 1989. He lives in Washington, DC.

Praise for this book

"One of the great things here is the seductive evocation of Venice, rich beyond measure and seen in its seedy intimacy as well as its eternal glamor."
--James Salter, author of Burning the Days

"Vaporetto 13 is easily the most evocative and disorienting Venetian tale since Don't Look Now."
--Jonathan Carroll, author of After Silence

"Carried along on the magnificent light of Robert Girardi's prose, his new novel is an exquisite journey down the seductive paths of love, desire, and money where all is beautiful and haunting and where, as if God and history intended it, we catch an unexpected glimpse of ourselves."
--Don Snyder, author of The Cliff Walk