Along with Ilaria’s welcome note, which included a list of instructions of things not to tamper with – crystals in the bathroom, runes on the bedroom floor, seashell sculpture above the bed – she had enclosed a pamphlet that someone had passed to her in a street in Calcutta. It was one of those New Age self-help things, on which she had scrawled – I hope you find everything you’re looking for in Venice.

Play cosmic with your mind and body!

Protect nature and remove poverty!

Being is simple, being somebody is complicated.

Silence is simple, speech is complicated.

Last century was ‘use and throw’,

Now ‘be mother to each to grow!’

The pamphlet, though ridiculous, makes me wistful for everything I’ve just left behind. I carry it around in the side pocket of my handbag as a kind of talisman.

I am alone here in Venice, and this is not a city that is built for loneliness. Too many honeymooning couples and groups of families and students, wandering around hypnotised by their tour guides’ coloured flags.

The Venetians I encounter are a dolorous species, drawn inwards towards their bodies. They slope through the streets at a pace, with certainty. Perhaps it’s the effect of being surrounded by so much beauty. Perhaps it’s a form of containment – a result of being hemmed in by buildings, sky, horizon, the ever-present water and its multitude of reflections. But they are nothing like the throngs who have come in June, like me. Tourists. Dizzy as dragonflies in the narrow alleyways, confused and bedazzled, peering from one glass shop window to the next.

I sleep with the blinds raised, poised for the morning sun to hit me in the face. Breakfast is at the Café Orientale, a tea room along the Rio Marin canal. Then I walk. Fortified by sugar, I walk for hours, getting lost, finding myself again. I eat lunch at the cheapest trattorias I can find. I could afford to do better, but I’m used to skimping. The food is mostly terrible, regardless.

Every day brings new tourists, rattling the wheels of their suitcases over the cobblestones, peering behind each corner of the maze, hoping to find their pensiones. Midway they pause to gape at the perfection of a small bridge, the serendipity of a gondoliere passing beneath it, singing.

Those dashing gondolieri in their striped T-shirts and straw hats – aren’t they tired of playing supporting roles in other people’s dreams?

I am waiting for something to happen, but it must happen without any conniving. I must keep walking until the moment comes upon me.

In the evenings, I stop at one of the bars behind the Rialto, for Spritz and cicheti. I don’t talk to anyone. I’m not interested in conversation. I stay away from museums and Vivaldi concerts and the Piazza San Marco. Nothing I want to happen will happen in any of these places.

Sometimes I take the number 1 vaporetto all the way to the Lido, marvelling at how the light skates off the tops of buildings. What colour is that? Burnt sienna? Rust? They don’t look real, those Venetian houses standing in water, with their cornices and frescoes. It is all mirage – floating and shifting – and only when the Grand Canal sweeps into the lagoon after the Santa Maria della Salute does the vision open, whiplashed by light. Space. And more space. Giudecca gleams like a beacon on the other side. And beyond – the islands of Murano, Burano, Torcello – a kaleidoscope of bridges, buildings, colour upon colour.