‘Get out of here,’ he says in the mornings, after I’ve taken him breakfast and antibiotics. ‘Get some air. You look like an animal in a cage.’

The streets of Venice are intolerable. I walk past glass-fronted shops, all in the business of selling mirages. Trinkets and masks. Rows and rows of pointless coloured glasses. There are a few treasures. A printer, close to Papi’s apartment. His name is Gianni. He looks like he has travelled here from a different century. He spends his days with gargantuan, laborious, hand-printing machines. He was the last to learn the art from the Armenian Mekhitarists on the island of San Lazzaro. He still speaks of Venice as if it were the centre of the world. I glide through his shop touching the array of visiting cards and thank-you notes – the paper, creamy and thick, far too luxurious for the disposable times we live in. ‘Guarda,’ he says, showing me the ex libris he made for Joseph Brodsky. It is an image of a cat reading a book. Gianni caresses the cat’s coat.

There is a woman who makes shoes. Soft, kidskin boots in bright colours. I think of childhood stories – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ – all those beauties could have come from this shop. They glow in windows – ankle boots, eighteenth-century-style slip-ons with short, sturdy heels, glamorous lace-ups trimmed with fur that sits at the widest part of the shank. I’d had no use for shoes in Paramankeni – just rubber slippers for the beach to protect against thorns, and a few pretty things for the city. The shoemaker sits in a chair, bent over her work, thread in her hands. I would like to go in and watch her, learn something of how she works. It feels ridiculous to have lived so long and learned nothing of a craft.

Venice is a kind of banishment. I take vaporettos to the islands. In Burano I point my phone at coloured buildings. They seem unreal – reds, blues, greens, yellows. A book I read mentions that the palazzos in Venice were once painted like this too. So much colour.

In Peggy Guggenheim’s museum I wonder what I would have done if I’d been incredibly rich and eccentric. Would I have surrounded myself with staggering beauty? Would I have had sex unrepentantly with other women’s husbands? And the dogs. I certainly would have had all those dogs.

The accident of birth. Papi and I have been talking. ‘I don’t think much of my parents now they are gone,’ he says. ‘But you feel it very much, cara, and you must move forward in your life.’