Tiziano Scarpa's amusing riff from his Venezia E'Un pesce (Venice Is a Fish), a work which also tells us that Venice ‘is constipated by the past’, reminds us that Venice is both miracle and byword; pace T. S. Eliot, it is the unrealest of cities; long before Calvino, it is the supreme idea of the invisible city made visible, but made visible in such a way that materiality seems instantly to resolve back into the mental, the immaterial, the idea.

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Calvino's Marco Polo tells Kubla Khan: ‘I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others … It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions’. This is Venice as the city from which all cities are deducible because it is their contradictory other and uncanny neighbour. As such it shadows the Victorian cultural imagination: magnificent opposite of the fog-ridden capital city and yet also double, since, as an empire founded on trade, Venice serves as type and warning, ‘in the fall | Of Venice’, Byron had warned his fellow-citizens, ‘think of thine, despite thy watery wall’.