THE SAVE VENICE BALL
Late April · New York · An Evening · Since 1971
The Save Venice Ball is a masked ball in New York each spring, given by Save Venice to pay for the restoration of the city’s paintings, churches and monuments.
The theme changes every year. The masks do not.
The Flood
On the fourth of November 1966 the tide came into Venice higher than anyone had ever recorded, and left the city’s churches, museums and houses soaked in salt water, mud and oil from burst heating tanks. Thousands were left without homes.
The world sent money, and more than thirty committees were formed to spend it. The most persistent was American. A group of Boston art historians, led by John McAndrew of Wellesley and Sydney Freedberg of Harvard, founded Save Venice in 1971 to pay for the city’s art to be restored, one work at a time. It has been doing so ever since, from New York.
Its method is patient and specific: a single altarpiece, a ceiling, a tomb, a wellhead, paid for in full and seen through to the end.
When the second-worst flood in the city’s history came, in November 2019, it set up a fund to protect the most vulnerable buildings before the next one.
The Ball
The ball is its principal evening in New York, and one of the few in the city where the dress is the event. A theme is set each year, and the masks are taken seriously: many are made to order, some of them in Venice, and there are prizes for the best.
Dinner is seated, the dancing goes late, and the party after it is often fuller than the ball.
The Court keeps a masquerade of its own in February, where the point of the mask is to hide who is wearing it. Here the point is to be seen in it.
What to Know
Black tie, and a mask. It should be a good one; this is a room that notices.
Save Venice keeps a library and study centre in Venice for scholars of the city’s art, and holds galas there in alternate years.
The Venice Biennale opens in the same season.
Tables are taken well before the date.
The Court
The Save Venice Ball is not the Court’s own. Places at a table, or a table for members together, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the evening around it: where to have a mask made, a car there and back, and a table afterward for those who have not had enough.
How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.
Set down September MMXXVI