Venice

The Venice Tavern was built on family. Several generations and more than 70 years after it opened, the Highlandtown basement bar still thrives. Italian immigrants Frank and Mary Victoria DeSantis Sr. opened the small bar in 1933. They named it after the Italian city, which Mary particularly liked. The couple's sixth and final child, Frank, was born on the second floor of the building that year. The couple ran the tavern for almost three decades, serving beer, liquor and some food. They built a close-knit clientele of neighborhood residents, who eventually started calling Mary DeSantis "Mom."

It is Easter Sunday morning and Mary Magdalena, the repentant sinner who renounced her old way of life to follow Christ, has come to mourn at his tomb. But he is no longer there: The stone sealing the entrance has been moved, and when Mary peers inside she is astonished to find the burial vault empty. Suddenly, a voice from behind her beckons and, turning, she recognizes the resurrected Christ standing before her. Overcome with emotion, she falls on her knees and reaches out to touch his garment; but he draws back saying, "Noli me tangere" -- do not touch me -- for he will soon join his heavenly father and is no longer of this world.

The City of Fallen Angels John Berendt Penguin Press / 432 pages When John Berendt, author of the wildly successful Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, arrived in Venice in February 1996 for an off-season visit, his plan was to spend a few quiet weeks enjoying the entrancing charms of the "other Venice," the quiet city that exists for Venetians before its annual invasion by tourists. Instead, he arrived to find waiting for him a Venetian story that begged to be written: the mysterious and dramatic destruction by fire of the Fenice, the city's historic opera house where five Verdi operas premiered.

Discover! America's Great River Road, Vol. 4 (Heritage Press, $19.95) It's a long way from St. Paul, Minn., to Venice, La. -- so long, in fact, that it took author Pat Middleton one volume to get from St. Paul to Dubuque, Iowa; another to get from Galena, Ill., to St. Louis; and a third to travel from St. Louis to Memphis. Now, in this fourth volume of Discover! America's Great River Road, Middleton completes the journey with the Memphis-to-Venice leg. Like the other volumes, it's loaded with points of interest, historical insights, maps and photos.

On September 18, 2005, KATHERINE R. SCHACKERT, 94, of Venice, FL., formerly of Baltimore. She was a clothing examiner for L. Grief & Bros. Men's clothing in Baltimore, retiring after more than 30 years. Survivors include many nieces and nephews, including Rosalie Lankford of Venice and cousins also survive. Services and interment were in Florida

LOS ANGELES - How does it feel to be the artist representing the United States at this year's Venice Biennale? Edward Ruscha sums it up in a four-letter word - gulp. If his response were writ large in one of his paintings, it might appear to float in the sky above Los Angeles, the city that has supplied him with images and ideas for nearly 50 years. His spoken "gulp" seems to fill the air in his industrial-style studio in the Venice section of Los Angeles as he talks about the prestigious international contemporary exhibition that begins next month.

Mel Gibson should have directed the movie version of The Merchant of Venice. Unafraid of reviving and fomenting anti-Semitic stereotypes, Gibson would have given moviegoers a Shylockian event to get riled up about. Michael Radford, an ultra-responsible filmmaker (he's best known for Il Postino), takes a middle-of-the road approach with this retelling of Shakespeare. He lays out from the opening titles the background of religious hatred that helps determine why the Jewish moneylender Shylock (Al Pacino)

Which artist will represent the United States when the Venice Biennale, arguably the most prestigious contemporary-arts festival in the world, opens next summer? Potentially, no one. The committee that recommends an artist to represent the United States at the Biennale has been disbanded by its overseer, the National Endowment for the Arts, which is rethinking its involvement with federal advisory committees. And the State Department, which is responsible for American representation at this and many other international exhibitions, is not only looking for someone to run it but also for someone to help pay for it. Last December, the two private partners that have helped support American participation in the Venice Biennale for 17 years, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation, withdrew their support, saying they were refocusing their grant programs.

If you miss the great Martin Beck mysteries by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, set in Stockholm, or find Henning Mankell's currently popular series about dour Swedish cop Kurt Wallander just too much of a downer, you should be as delighted as I am to welcome to American bookshelves Inspector Konrad Sejer -- a disarmingly thoughtful, refreshingly gentle and totally likable senior police investigator in Oslo. Don't Look Back (Harcourt, 295 pages, $23) is the fifth -- though first to be published here -- in Karin Fossum's Sejer series, well received in Europe.

In Rebecca Pawel's strongly atmospheric Law of Return (Soho Press, 274 pages, $24), Guardia Civil Carlos Tejada finds himself marking time in Franco's Spain until an important parolee goes missing, presumed murdered. Tejada, investigating the missing Manuel Arroyo Diaz and his wealthy and influential in-laws, may ruin the plans of another parolee, Guillermo Fernandez, to smuggle a colleague and Jewish German classics scholar across the French border and onto a ship to Mexico. Because Tejada had met Fernandez's daughter Elena while at his previous posting in Madrid, he feels duty-bound to help her family.