I have visited Venice in high summer, when crowds swarm on St Mark’s Square like a flock of cooing pigeons, and in springtime, when lovers stroll hand in hand across the Bridge of Sighs. But I also love Venice when it is shrouded in mists and fog; a place where things go bump in the night, and the unknown is concealed in the shadowy corners of the city.
This is the landscape that inspired Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, her eerie novella set in the city; and it may not be coincidental that Venice was also her chosen code word for her hidden bisexual feelings for other women. As she wrote to a female friend in 1951, ‘I glory in my Venice, when I am in a Venice mood, and forget about it when I am not.’
Du Maurier’s Venice is, therefore, a secretive place, as much a state of mind as a former nation state; sinister yet seductive, impossible to escape. Hence the downfall of the narrator in another of her most unsettling Venetian stories, Ganymede, the tale of an Englishman who falls in love with a handsome teenage boy, a waiter in St Mark’s Square; for this traveller, Venice is the uncelestial city from which there can be no return.
Having embarked upon writing Daphne, a novel about du Maurier, I soon realised that I would have to return to Venice for research. There could be no better time than a week in winter, when tourists are scant on the ground. I knew that du Maurier had visited Venice on several occasions in the 1950s and 60s with her son Kits, with whom she stayed at the Hotel Bauer. Given that the Bauer was one of the locations for Nicholas Roeg’s adaptation of Don’t Look Now (including the famous bedroom scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), it seemed like a good base. Indeed, it is likely to be the unnamed hotel described in du Maurier’s original story. ‘Their hotel by the Grand Canal had a welcoming, comforting air. The clerk smiled as he handed over their key…’
The Bauer still retains a comforting air, though it includes a fabulously elegant wing, furnished in the style of a Venetian palazzo. It’s in this wing that you’ll find the ornate Royal Suite, room 206, where Don’t Look Now was filmed. I was staying in a smaller, cosier room (which is not shorthand for ‘cramped’; it was the perfect place to retreat after tramping around the murky streets of Venice, tracing du Maurier’s footsteps). But I was given a peek inside the suite by the hotel’s owner, Francesca Bortolotto Possati, who inherited it from her grandfather, along with a palazzo on the Grand Canal and a fund of intriguing stories. I soon discovered that Donald Sutherland still stays in the Royal Suite when he visits Venice.
Francesca’s advice to me, and anyone else who visits Venice out of season, is to lose oneself, quite literally: ‘Winter is the time for walking and getting lost…’ That’s precisely what du Maurier described in Don’t Look Now. The geographical details of the alleyways in which the novella’s protagonist, John, meets a grisly end are sufficiently detailed to be followed through the city like a guidebook: ‘They turned down the Fondamenta dell’Arsenale and crossed the little bridge short of the Arsenal itself, and so on past the church of San Martino. There were two canals ahead, one bearing right, the other left, with narrow streets beside them.’
John takes the left-hand turning, which, when I saw it in daylight, had given an impression of warmth and secluded shelter. But at night, it looked more menacing: ‘ill-lit, almost in darkness, the windows of the houses shuttered, the water dank, the scene appeared altogether different, neglected, poor, and the long narrow boats moored to the slippery steps of the cellar entrances looked like coffins.’
Fortunately, unlike poor John, I did not come across a murderous red-cloaked dwarf on my trip to this particular neighbourhood. (It turns out that du Maurier based the story on her sighting here of a tiny figure in a scarlet pixie hood, who, to her shock, was revealed to be a menacing-looking woman, rather than a child).
But where I did end up losing myself was in du Maurier’s favourite game of making up stories about strangers, or as John puts it, the ‘fantasies about people at other tables’.
I played the game as I lingered over breakfast every morning in the Bauer’s Settimo Cielo, an aptly named seventh heaven eyrie opening onto a roof terrace with panoramic views over the city, and a pearl-grey sky merging into the silvery water. I was intrigued by my fellow guests: an American princess, telling her parents she needed Ritalin to write her college essays; an elderly couple in matching red cashmere jumpers on Valentine’s Day, as tender with one another as if it were their honeymoon – unlike the young English couple beside me, icy after a lovers’ quarrel. Altogether less sinister than du Maurier’s Venice, I confess, but quietly transfixing nevertheless.
Now that my book is finished, I plan to return to Venice soon. And though I tell myself I should bask in its summer sunshine, I still feel drawn to its quieter, darker moods. This is a city that knows the meaning of danger – not least from its rising winter floods – yet it’s a city which always survives the worst threats, emerging from the mists into a pale golden dawn.
Justine Picardie’s latest book Daphne (£7.99, Bloomsbury) is out this month in paperback.
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