Vaporetto 13: A Novel

Jack Squire is a currency trader from Washington, D.C. on assignment to Venice, where he discovers both the light and dark of the city. Caterina is the girl from Venice who haunts Jack Squire.

Published by a Delacorte in 1997, the third of four by Girardi that they carried.

Kirkus, 08/15/1997 "For as long as the tale's dream state is sustained, the result is exquisite and eerie."

Literary Review, January 1998 "Girardi elevates the commonplace theme of spirituality versus Mammon into a haunting fantasy." — Lisa Allardice

Times Literary Supplement, 03/06/1998 "Girardi's stories operate at the fringes of their genre, where actualized metaphor blurs into merely improbable realism; he has a good eye for the details which make the supernatural or flamboyant plausible....The sense of the gradual meltdown of his life is precisely handled....There are moments of closely imagined strangeness....[T]he weirdness is balanced by the quotidian Venice..., a bourgeois city of baptisms and adultery."[1]

The New York Times Book Review, 11/30/1997 "...Girardi suffuses his narrative with rich descriptions of the food, fashion, traditions and architecture of Venice. With this artful novel, he invites us to put aside our rational skepticism and enter a world where the past is still hauntingly present."[2] — Malachy Duffy,

San Fransicisco Chronicle 10/26/97 "Surprisingly, the ghost story and the morality tale don't clash but fit together nicely. Where Girardi goes astray is in his occasionally purple passages and obvious, over-the-top effects: Making love to Caterina, Jack finds her <<cold as stone>> and thinks <<or a quick, strange moment of grave markers and tombs.>> But Girardi succeeds in making our modern, soulless world seem far more frightening than whatever specters might haunt us from the past."[3] - Alix Madrigal