Where the sun falls and time doesn’t exist.

Italy 2016

If your novel has a character who roams the streets after he’s been presumed dead, there’s a city fit for your setting, one suffused with centuries of mystery and intrigue and shadow:

Out of a strange self-consciousness at standing still, Ray began to walk, shy now of the humble brushing sound of his desert boot soles on the cement…Near the end of the arcade, he went out into the Piazza again and looked at the cathedral as he walked by it, blinked as he always had at its complexity, its variety of styles all crammed together. An artistic mess, he supposed, yet it had been erected to amaze and impress, and in that it succeeded.

Ray Garrett, a character believed to have been murdered in Rome, has made his way to Venice, a city more pregnant with possibility for the suspicious and sinister aspects of a Patricia Highsmith plot. And her 1967 novel Those Who Walk Away takes full advantage of its location, as the enigmatic comes alive in Venice’s narrow lanes, darkened canals, and disorienting alleys.

All readers can surely agree with one conclusion: Venice shouldn’t exist. A reasonable and logical world wouldn’t permit the continuation of a city in which its very existence is preposterous. Any basic calculation of finances and prudence would shut its ports and transfer its population tomorrow. It’s sinking, it’s impossible to maintain, it’s crowded and inefficient and wasteful. Yet it persists.

Against these challenges, all jobs in Venice are maritime jobs: construction workers and electricians and bartenders are crew members on the forever sinking ship. Cleaning a storefront is to be a deckhand; wearing a police uniform is to join the coast guard. There isn’t a single task removed from the results of floods, humidity, salt. Imagine being a Venetian plumber. Or a printer that manages a daily press run by steel, oil, and paper. Everyone is a maritime worker.

When I first visited Venice a few years ago, I was provided a rather startling warning. The words themselves didn’t necessitate any need for alarm, yet the owner of the single room that I rented decided to imbue her sentences with a tone more appropriate for danger. Venetian by birth, her words came laced with the accent distinct to her city, but her phrasing slowed—almost comically—to say: “There’s no time here. Be careful.” She went on to tell me, still in the tone of caution and vigilance rather than delight, that afternoons quickly become evenings, that midday strolls abruptly become midnight wanderings. For a new lodger setting down his bags and picking up his keys, there wasn’t a logical reason why her admonition didn’t take a joyful, illuminating tone, though her chosen register did have the effect of being unforgettable.

She could have added that Venice is where those with a good sense of direction go to get lost. The sun does—as forewarned—seem to fall rather than descend, and there’s enough reflective canals and narrow lanes for the shadows to consistently mislead. Italy isn’t known in particular for its watches, but an abrupt explanation comes every evening, I discovered, for why so many storefronts in Venice sell timepieces.

Death in Venice is one of the most prominent stories set in the city, and contemporary readers might lift an eyebrow when they realize that its pages contain a plague. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer struggling with his pen—a truly sympathetic character—who travels to Venice, where he meets a city behind a mask. Thomas Mann provides appearances for his character, even conclusions, before each reversal comes. What’s first seen is never quite what Aschenbach later finds. The city Mann selected for his novella—one amid a secret cholera epidemic, hidden by the residents from the tourists—couldn’t have been more apt, one fitting for the cliché, as the mask eventually becomes the face.

In Aschenbach’s artistic struggles, the reader discovers a confrontation: his thoughts waver from the mysterious elements of creation, to what he can understand with cold rationality. But his destination of Venice isn’t designed for even a chilly sense of prudence. Nothing prudent comes from having waiters, tailors, and grocers spending all their time beating back salt and tide and wind. How can a forever sinking city not be absurd? In Venice the only conclusion is that the illogical must be essential. Aschenbach’s very arrival brings the numinous alive:

He again set eyes on the most astounding landing, that blinding composition of fantastic architecture, which the Republic has to offer the awestruck looks of the approaching seafarer: the light grandeur of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the columns topped with the lion and the saint close to the shore, the flauntingly projecting flank of St Mark's, the view of St Mark's Clock, and thus contemplating he thought that arriving in Venice from the train station was like entering a palace through the servants' entrance and that one should always, like himself, travel across the ocean to the most improbable of cities.

Yet this sensation quickly dissipates, as Venice begins to “cast its spell” and “the mercenary spirit” of shopkeepers and gondoliers bring the already downcast Aschenbach to despondency. Like countless travelers, he considers cutting his trip short, returning to his more predictable home. Venice isn’t offering its pleasures without the unwanted cost of disorientation. Aschenbach does resist this impulse to leave and, instead, goes even further into the labyrinth, amid confusion, suspicion, while doubting the words he hears:

…an antique dealer in front of his parlor invited the visitor with fawning gestures, hoping to swindle him. That was Venice, alluring and dubiously entrancing — this city, part fairy tale, part tourist trap, in the putrid atmosphere of which art used to blossom luxuriously and which had inspired musicians with lulling melodies. The adventurer felt as if his eyes were drinking that kind of luxury, as if his ears were courted by those kinds of melodies; he also recalled that the city was ailing and kept it secret because of its lucre, and he gazed even more unrestrainedly at the gondola in front.

Of all the locations that Thomas Mann could have chosen for his novella—a story of artistic longing, lust, where appearances deceive—we should consider it notable that he felt pulled toward Venice. Here’s one place where the incoherent and absurd and preposterous rule, where the meaningful isn’t contingent upon reason—a perfect setting for Gustav von Aschenbach, an artist unable to create.

A newfound sense of preparation has come, however, in recent years, as Venice has water gates now—the MOSE—which are supposed to prevent the worst floods; I see that they worked in October, causing celebration, and weren’t even deployed last week, causing consternation. An all too fitting bureaucratic dispute seems to be the simple culprit—the gates weren’t raised, the city flooded. A more prudent world would have prevented this fiasco, though at least there’s a curious satisfaction in knowing that Venice’s endless struggle against nature will continue; generations from now, those not yet born will persist in the costly, ridiculous, and imprudent battle against the sea. But to live in a world that doesn’t include Venice would certainly be miserable, as that would reveal the horror of prudence overshadowing value.

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