Henry James was captivated by Venice for forty years. The city is the setting for some of his more notable shorter fiction, namely The Aspern Papers, and for a substantial section of his novel, The Wings of the Dove. As well as providing inspiration for his fiction, James opens his collection Italian Hours with several essays on Venice; and, even though Italian Hours explores almost twenty cities, the section on Venice constitutes about a quarter of the book's length. These essays, written over a period of thirty years (between 1872 and 1902), celebrate a familiarity with Venice's idiosyncratic beauty. In his longest essay on the city, simply entitled ‘Venice’ (originally published in 1882), James rhapsodizes about the place in uncharacteristically erotic terms: ‘You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair’.1 However, such adoration is often combined with painful recollections and fears for the future. The city evokes feelings of melancholy and foreboding, as a golden age slips into a past that is only retrievable through reminiscence while tourists taint the vestiges of a former splendour. What emerges as a constant for James is the magnetism of Venice's architecture – with St Mark's as ‘a great hoary shadowy tabernacle of mosaic and marble … an immense piece of Romanticism’ – and, even more importantly, the lasting impression of its art.