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Venice is one of those bucket-list places, a city so extraordinary, you want to see it at least once. But un- less you’re the kind of fabulous per- son who regularly attends the Venice Film Festival or owns a palazzo, it may not be somewhere you return. It’s small, it’s expensive, it’s over- crowded, and it’s sinking. Then again, it’s Venice. For those of us who love to travel, the question of whether to revisit a place is a repeated conundrum. You go back to some places to see certain people or to visit in the com- pany of new people. You return to see what you missed or to see it again. Whichever way, return travel is as much an act of time travel as it is a geographic one. You’ve changed, and the place has changed. You’re visiting not simply a place, but a place captured in a READER’S DIGEST moment in time – one that exists for you in the past and for a past version of yourself. Travel writers often wrestle with this. “By day I wander the alleys and monuments that had so fascinated me as a young man,” the legendary travel writer Colin Thubron wrote on returning to Damascus in 2017 after 50 years. “Sometimes I find myself gazing through his eyes, remem- bering the youthful enchantment of entering an old mosque or a sultan’s I recently went to Venice, where I had been invited to participate in an arts conference. It was the first time I’d been back in 32 years. Venice offers a streetscape quite unlike anywhere else in the world PHOTOS: (PREVIOUS PAGE): RABBIT75_IST/GETTY IMAGES (THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE): SHUTTERSTOCK 10 June/July 2025