“Considered in the cold light of reason, a visit to Venice might sound pretty grim. It is underpopulated (except by pigeons), overvisited, chronically polluted and notoriously expensive. Subsiding inexorably into theme-park status, the city that built its reputation on hard-nosed mercantile pragmatism has turned to fleecing foreign tourists for a living. But there’s no point in taking a down-to-earth view of Venice. This is a city which seems, quite literally, out of this world. Drifting like a mirage upon the surface of its lagoon, it could almost be set, as one early medieval visitor put it, ‘between the star Arcturus and the shining Pleiades’.?