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The hidden secrets of la Serenissima

Where do writers get their ideas? Novelists can be vague about what sparks the beginnings of a book - but Daphne du Maurier knew exactly what inspired her finest short story.
She had taken a trip to Torcello, the largely deserted island on the fringes of the Venetian lagoon.
While she was having an alfresco lunch in the sunny garden of the Locanda Cipriani (it's still well worth taking the time to make the journey for a meal), du Maurier recalled observing a young couple at a neighbouring table.
'They looked so handsome and beautiful and yet they seemed to have a terrible problem and I watched them with sadness,' the novelist wrote later.
'The young man tried to cheer his wife up but to no avail and it struck me perhaps that their child had died of meningitis.'
A curious intuition, but du Maurier was able to spin this slender observation into literary gold. She named the couple John and Laura Baxter and they became the central characters of Don't Look Now.
For some cities, you need to pack a guidebook. The museums of Paris, for example, or the classical antiquities of Greece will make little sense without the detailed notes of a glossy Dorling Kindersley or a Blue Guide.
For other places, you would do best to take a novel. E M Forster's A Room With A View brings Florence alive, and you would be mad to contemplate a visit to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona without taking Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
And nothing quite summons up the ambience of out-of-season Venice as Don't Look Now.
In Penguin's du Maurier short stories collection, Don't Look Now runs to fewer than 50 pages, but each time I read them I am effortlessly transported to the deserted backstreets of la Serenissima.
Guidebooks lay out the menu of a place, as it were, but they don't usually tell you what to eat. With a copy of Don't Look Now in your hand, du Maurier can guide you through her Venice. It's a pleasure worth lingering over.

Read more in our destination guide to Italy.