Venice has been both the star and the stage of many of the world’s finest writers and, from the early Renaissance, when the city became the richest trading power of the age, it has been a constant draw for the creative.

Though Venice has produced few outstanding writers of its own – Goldoni and Casanova are rare exceptions – the calibre of its admirers is beyond question. In the Renaissance, the great scholar Petrarch, the ‘Father of Humanism’, left the city his painstakingly collected library of classical works, while for those who knew it only by repute, like Shakespeare, it became a synonym for wealth, majesty and the frailty of mankind.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Venice’s economy was in decline, but its reputation for indulgent pleasure was certainly not and well-born young men, completing their Grand Tour, considered it an essential item on their itinerary. For writers of the time, from Voltaire to Lord Byron, the city’s fading splendours and decadent lifestyle were to become emblematic of the lapsed glories of ancient civilisations and the perils of hedonism.

Its aesthetic reputation was reborn in the nineteenth century, under Ruskin’s admiring spotlight, and in his wake came Robert Browning and the great American realist Henry James. But the city as a catalyst for the imagination remains a constant. From Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, from Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers to Donna Leon’s detective Brunetti, it has become an eternal archetype of beauty, melancholy and decay.

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