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A lovely city, russet brown and dusty rose and baking in the August afternoon. So keen was I to catch my quarry that I had only allowed myself a two-hour window here, stomping across beautiful piazzas and over mediaeval bridges, ticking them off the list — an appalling way to see a city, really, a betrayal of our original intent when planning the Grand Tour. No matter — there were more important things than culture now. I noted the fine Roman amphitheatre, third largest in the world — tick — saw the Torre dei Lamberti, the market on the Piazza delle Erbe, ornate Piazza dei Signori — tick, tick, tick. Marching along a marble-paved shopping street, I followed the crowd through an alleyway into a packed, cacophonous courtyard beneath a stone balcony — Juliet’s balcony, supposedly. It looked as if it had been glued to the wall, and sure enough my guidebook informed me with a sniff that it was only built in 1935, though given that Juliet was a fictional character, this seemed to be missing the point. ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo!’ shouted wags from around the globe. In the heat of mid-afternoon the courtyard was a literal tourist trap, but I watched dutifully as perspiring visitors took it in turns to pose with a kitsch-y bronze statue of Shakespeare’s heroine, her right breast worn grey from a million hands. Fondling her breast brought good luck, apparently. A Japanese gentleman nudged my arm and mimed a camera, international sign language for ‘do you want me to take your picture?’, but I struggled to imagine that a photograph of me squeezing the breast of a bronze statue would be anything other than soul-crushing and so politely declined, pushing my way towards the exit, pausing only to read the graffiti’d wall, layer upon layer of Simone 4 Veronica, Olly + Kerstin, Marco e Carlotta. I could have added to it, I suppose: Connie and Douglas 4ever. Je t’aime, I read, ti amo, ik hou van je, the declarations so densely inscribed as to resemble a Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock. ‘You see, Connie? I’m learning,’ I said out loud. ‘Ik hou van je.’

99. ferrovia

The only way to arrive in Venice is an early-morning water taxi across the lagoon. I arrived by train at night with the backpackers and the students who tumbled, thrilled and dazed, out of the strange and rather elegant railway station, a low-ceilinged marble slab like the kind of coffee table that you crack your shins on. I had found the city’s last remaining room in a remote, unpromising pensione in Castello and decided to walk that considerable distance, striding along the still-bustling Strada Nova, peering into youthful faces in case Albie was already here. Venice in high summer was a new experience for me and I noted the humid air and the brackish, ammonia smell of the canals before realising with some embarrassment that the stagnant odour was coming from me. Somewhere between Munich and Venice I had come to smell like a canal, and I resolved to address this in the comfort of my hotel room.

But for the first time my orienteering failed me, the fondamentas, rivas, salitas and salizzadas sending me in circles, and it wasn’t until after midnight that I arrived at the Pensione Bellini, a cramped and crumbling building in the shadow of the Arsenale.

There’s something furtive and indecent about arriving at a hotel after midnight, and the resentful and suspicious night manager directed me up many flights of stairs to an attic room the size of a double bed, containing a single bed. Through the thin wall I could hear the hotel’s boiler gurgle and then roar into life. I peered into the mirror in the glare of the bare bulb. The heat and humidity were Amazonian and rubbing the skin on my perspiring forehead produced a grey scurf like the debris from a pencil eraser, the accumulated grime of seven nations. I had not shaved since Paris, barely slept since Amsterdam, not changed my clothes since Munich. Verona’s sun had glazed my nose, and only my nose, to a flowerpot red, while the skin beneath my eyes was blue-grey with exhaustion. I looked haggard, there was no denying it, like a hostage about to record a video message. To Albie’s eyes I would look frankly alarming but I was too worn out to remedy this now, even to make the journey to the shared bathroom in the hall. Instead I scraped at my armpits with plastic soap and brown water from the tiny sink, rinsed my fusty clothes and lay them like seaweed on the window ledge, collapsed onto the sagging mattress and, to the roar and gurgle of hotel plumbing, fell instantly asleep.

100. an experiment with mice