Charity’s CEO Sees Young People as Key to Restoration of Antique City

At age 32, Michael John Dagon says he has found the job that he hopes will last a lifetime.

Mr. Dagon is the new executive director of Save Venice, a 36-year-old New York organization whose mission is to restore the city’s artwork and architecture. Those valuable cultural resources were damaged by floods in 1966 that wracked Venice and Florence.

In response to the flooding, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization helped organize groups in more than 30 countries under a joint effort, the International Campaign for the Safeguarding of Venice. Save Venice is the largest of the 23 organizations still working on projects to help the Italian city.

An agency created by the Italian government to oversee restoration projects provides Save Venice and other groups with wish lists for projects that need financing, as does the Roman Catholic Church. So far, Save Venice has donated $1-million annually for 55 projects, and has helped to restore more than 100 pieces of the city’s cultural heritage, including churches, residences, frescoes, and other paintings, as well as a cemetery that served the city’s Jewish residents.

An art historian by training, and a nonprofit professional who has geared his career toward running a cultural organization, Mr. Dagon left a fund-raising post at Barnard College to manage Save Venice’s $2-million budget.

“I’m here to stay,” he says. “I wanted to be doing something that combined my love for Italian culture and my ability to manage an organization. To the greatest extent possible, this is it, this is what I wanted to do.”

For a leader who is actually a few years younger than the organization he is now running, Mr. Dagon has an extensive familiarity with the Renaissance-era art and architecture that are central to Save Venice’s mission. He taught in Florence and ran a student-exchange program in Venice in the mid-1990s; in addition, he has studied art in Rome, Florence, and Venice and is fluent in Italian.

While his experience is important, Mr. Dagon says he hopes his youth will actually be an asset — particularly when it comes to energizing young donors who are an essential source of funds for Save Venice.

Since its founding, the group has always been something of a society cause. Its annual costume ball and benefit has long been covered by women’s fashion magazines, as well as New York and Boston society columns, and a significant portion of its budget comes from the organization’s membership club, Young Friends of Save Venice, which operates in both cities. Mr. Dagon, who worked in Los Angeles at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles Opera before returning to the East Coast, is also trying to build Save Venice’s presence in Los Angeles.

“It’s something you can’t ignore — a group of 21-to-39-year-olds who are that committed to the cause,” Mr. Dagon says of the Young Friends. “They wanted someone who could not only relate, but also be interested in nurturing that. You’re hoping you could bring up the next generation of leaders in the organization.”

While Save Venice has thrived as a pet charity of the upper crust, it has also suffered from some of the controversies that seem endemic to the social elite.

In 1998, the group’s board fractured over what some saw as a drift too close to the jet set and too far from the ideals of restoration and recovery. Some board members left to found Venetian Heritage, taking some of the Save Venice glitz with it but not managing to surpass its fund-raising achievements.

Lately, restoration efforts in Venice have been overshadowed as international attention has focused on concerns that the city is in danger of falling into the Adriatic Sea, the result of rising water levels and soil decay. Mr. Dagon does not see any reason to be flustered by the concerns about future flooding.

“If we worried, we’d have had to hang the ‘gone fishing’ sign out the front door a while ago,” he says. “We have faith that these systems will be put in place and will work. Look at what’s happened already. When Save Venice started 30 years ago, the city was absolutely filthy, and this effort has really made a significant difference.”

In an interview, Mr. Dagon spoke about his new role:

What makes the art and architecture of Venice so especially worthy of saving?

Venice has an international appeal. If you say Venice to people, almost anyone anywhere conjures up an image and a response. They say it’s where the gondoliers row, where The Merchant of Venice took place. There are so many different references. There’s an appeal that Venice has on so many levels — it’s romantic, it’s mysterious — that there’s a large number of people that have some kind of attachment to the city. And it is in such a fragile state by its very nature of being in the sea, that it’s justifiable to say that Venice needs more help than other cities. The fact that the medieval population was able to conceive a city there, and they’re still keeping the city up, it’s amazing. One of our donors, she had gone once in her life, and she left half of her estate to help a restoration. People are touched when they go to Venice in a way that they aren’t in other places.

Why have society groups adopted Venice as an important project?

I don’t think they’re different from people you’d find at art museums and opera companies, and in fact many of our donors are involved with art museums and opera companies, but I think it goes hand in hand. Loving the arts in general is the common thread between them all.

It’s the opportunity to experience the restoration process, and to truly, in person, hands-on see what is happening in the restoration process. We’re offering donors the opportunity to quite literally be on the scaffolding during the process. Those are the things that are truly one of a kind. You don’t get that kind of experience anywhere else. A donor can see a dress rehearsal, but when you see works of art that are renowned around the world, and revered in important parts of Western culture, and you had some kind of role in their history, it’s a very powerful element to the organization’s call.

What are some of the major restorations Save Venice has undertaken over the years?

To the organization, the restoration of the Church of Santa Maria di Miracoli [begun in 1988 and completed in 1998] was a defining moment. They had never remotely taken on a project of this size and scale. It was an entire church, inside and out, head to toe, and a big financial commitment, a multiyear project. At that point the organization really became a professional organization, hiring a staff, creating an office in Venice itself, and implementing a fund-raising structure. The total cost was $4-million over 10 years, and for the organization, that was a major leap.

Do you have “pet projects” that you would like to advocate for?

I’m hesitant to get involved quite to that level. Are there certain projects I might be attached to, might be more spirited in seeking funding for? Absolutely. But as far as telling [people in Venice] what to do, that isn’t the way they work. It’s wonderful that we’ve been allowed in. It really says something about Venice. You don’t see this in other cities in Italy. Florence suffered from the floods, maybe even more drastically than Venice did, and this did not happen there. Florence is a closed city, it’s not as international in nature as Venice has been historically. There weren’t the enclaves of immigrants of people willing to work in Florence in the same way.

ABOUT MICHAEL JOHN DAGON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF SAVE VENICE

Education: Earned a bachelor of arts from John Carroll University, in Cleveland, in 1993 and a master’s of arts from the Syracuse University Florence Program in 1995.

Previous employment: Worked as associate director of major gifts at Barnard College, in New York, from January 2001 until September 2002. Before that, worked as a fund raiser at the New York and Los Angeles Operas and as a special-projects curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.

On his summer reading list: Anthony Blunt: His Lives, by Miranda Carter; Italy and Its Discontents, by Paul Ginsborg; A Venetian Affair (coming out in September), by Andrea di Robilant; and the libretto to Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello.