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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. ... more

Our water baby

When my wife and I first went to Venice together, in January 1990, the city took something of a back seat to our brand new relationship. The five days we spent at the Gritti Palace Hotel come back to me now only as disconnected flashes.
I remember the impossible grandeur of our corner room over the Grand Canal - its chandelier and giant 18th-century writing-desk, and the regular churning of vaporetti water-buses below our window.
I remember the magical emptiness of the city off-season, when St Mark's Square was filled only by mist and pigeons, and the loudest sound after dark was footsteps on centuries-old flagstones.
I remember the dalmatian we saw squatting on those same flagstones with its tail stuck out like a ramrod, and Sue's words as we hastily looked away: 'If I ever show signs of wanting a dog, just remind me of this moment.'
Most of all, I remember the moment in our room at the Gritti when we decided to become proper grown-ups, settle down and have a baby.
Now, 13 years later, our 'baby' is a bustling pre-teen, and at the end of the Christmas holidays we returned to to Venice to show Jessica what inspired the best idea of our lives.
Not that we were sure of a positive outcome. Pre-teens can be stubbornly impervious to history or culture. Wanting her to love it so much could, we knew, have the very opposite effect.
We needn't have worried. Our Venice baby was hooked from the moment we landed at the new Marco Polo Airport and sped across the lagoon by water-taxi.
We reached the Grand Canal just as everything was lighting up for the evening. Christmas trees still sparkled in the shops over the Rialto Bridge, and the windows of the waterside palazzi glowed pink or gold.
Ahead of us came six crowded gondolas, moving dead abreast and in perfect time. One gondolier sang an operatic aria while another played an accordion.
'Pretty gorgeous, isn't it?' I said to Jessica. 'Yeah, it's cool,' she replied. Venice could wish for no higher accolade. ... more

On the waterfront

From the Mail on Sunday

For me, it was love at first sight. In the summer of 1946 I was 16 years old and we were staying at my parents' favourite hotel, a ravishing little 15th century building on the very edge of Lake Garda. The proprietor was a drunken old Irishman whom my parents loved; despite the hotel's considerable discomfort, they went every peacetime summer for a quarter of a century.
One day my mother said: 'Let's go to Venice.' It was only two hours or so away. We left early by car, arrived midmorning and went straight to St Mark's by gondola. In those days gondolas were cheap and a perfectly normal means of transport. They did not cater exclusively for tourists (then still mercifully few) as they do now, and I remember that 40-minute journey down the Grand Canal as if it was yesterday.
After lunch my mother went shopping, while my father took me on a long walk through the city and taught me one of the first and most important lessons about Venice - that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; that however beautiful the individual churches and palaces may be, the ultimate miracle is the ensemble, the city itself. 'And so,' he said, 'we shall go into just two buildings: to begin with, St Mark's; to finish, Harry's Bar.'
For the rest we walked and he talked; and all too soon the day was over and we were back in a gondola, returning to the car park and the outside world. Night was falling, the lights were coming on, Venice was becoming more romantically beautiful every minute. Never have I left anywhere with such aching regret.
As the years passed I returned whenever I could. By now, 55 years after that first visit, I must have clocked up at least a couple of hundred more but the magic has never faded; my love affair with Venice continues undimmed - every time is as good as the first.
When the airport launch turns into the first canal - and Venice, being a tightly knit group of islands, has no suburbs - my heart quickens its beat. Then I hear the old, familiar Venetian sounds - the churning of the vaporetti, the wash of waves on the quaysides, the constant ringing of the church bells - and there wells up within me a feeling of homecoming.
I still go several times a year. Nowadays it tends to be for two or three days at the most, talking to business conferences or taking small groups round the city; but that, too, I love - there's no fun like infecting other people with one's own enthusiasm. A murmured 'Wow!' - or even occasionally a 'Gee whiz!' - is more than enough reward. ... more

On the trail of love

First, the vital statistics. He was 6ft 1in, a giant among men in 18th-century Venice. And as he tells it in his memoirs, he was a giant in other respects, too . . .
The odd thing is that few Venetians pay much attention to the Casanova legend.
If you come to the city in search of a statue or museum, you will look in vain. Yet there could have been no better backdrop for his amorous antics.
Venice is a city built for intrigue, a place of labyrinthine canals and backstreets so narrow you can reach into your neighbour's bedroom.
It's a place where disguise was - and still is - a flourishing industry, with a mask workshop down every alley.
Born to actor parents in 1725, Casanova's glory days in Venice, before imprisonment, flight and exile, are savoured in salacious detail in the memoirs written in his dotage.
No fewer than 2,000 women fell under his spell. We have to take his word for it, since not one love letter survives.
But now some modern Venetian women are reviving the seducer's flagging profile with a new city tour, Casanova And The Age Of Decadence.
Just launched, the walk is run by a team of women and guided by excitable enthusiast Dr Maria Colombo.
There were four of us on the tour. The other three were men: a management consultant, a retired academic in sandals, and a balding novelist.
Why is the tour always dominated by men when it was women who adored him? Maria was perplexed.
'Casanova was so loved by women in his lifetime,' she stressed. 'He was a really charming man who respected his lovers.' ... more

Its enchantment will bring you back

Always respect Venice and it will respect you. The people are kind and friendly, and will help you in every way, but do respect their lifestyle.
Don't try to enter their beautiful churches and elegant palaces scantilty dressed. Save that for the beach on the delightful Lido.
I always walk round with a light cotton pair of trousers to slip over my shorts. It saves disappointment when you come across a church by chance.
And you will come across the most exciting places by just strolling round the alleyways and along the canals.
Food and drink is inexpensive if you are sensible. Treat yourself to a sit down drink at least once in St Marks Square listening to the orchestra.
Put one day aside to take the boat trip to Murano for glass, Torcello for history, and Burano for lace.
Buy a pass for the vaporetto (water bus) for the number of days you require. Get up early one morning, board it at the Piazza Roma (first stop), dash for the front of the boat, and glide all the way down the grand canal and over to the Lido. All the romance of the Titanic, without the iceberg.
If you go once, you will go many times in your life, such is its enchantment.
Be happy. ... more