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Jan Morris’s highly celebrated 1960 travelogue, Venice , which details the city’s vast history and culture, as well as No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice (2007) by Ameri- can columnist and Venice devotee Judith Martin. I saw new movies, from The Wings of the Dove to the remake of The Italian Job , that cast Venice as a place of tragic beauty and elusive wealth. I watched older ones such as 1973’s Don’t Look Now , in which a dilapidated, almost cor- roded Venice serves as a backdrop to menace and terror, and The Comfort of Strangers from 1990. It became hard to reconcile my faded version of Venice with all the data I’d absorbed since. Venice, the headlines told me, was flooded; Ven- ice was sinking; Venice was possibly saved. The pandemic crushed and then perhaps rescued Venice’s tour- ism industry. The city had become so overcrowded, it had started charging entry fees yet was conflicted about being treated like a museum rather than a living city. All this led to a certain amount of trepidation. Had Venice become overly commercialised, ruined in the interim? Every traveller has been told on one journey or another, “You should have been here 30 years ago.” You missed Angkor Wat when it was largely aban- doned. Beijing when the sky was still blue. Iceland before Instagram. It can seem that you’ve always arrived too late. And if you return, you can’t help but draw comparisons between the Venice’s Grand Canal leads to the famous St Mark’s Square PHOTOS: SHUTTERSTOCK 12 June/July 2025 READER’S DIGEST