One day a man’s golden retriever leaps on to the vaporetto but the man gets left behind because of a stampede of Chinese tourists. The conductor says it’s okay. He knows this dog. His owner will find him at the next stop. And sure enough, there he is, at the Accademia, flushed and out of breath. ‘Amilcare,’ the owner says. ‘There you are, Amilcare.’ The dog bounds off loyally behind his owner. I long for a golden dog of my own.

I return every night with blistered toes. I come home from walking and sit in the tub with bath salts for half an hour. The bath is made of boat wood and there’s a skylight in the roof, which makes you feel like you’re sailing away in the waters surrounding you.

I keep few supplies in the apartment. Fruit, bread, pasta, peperoncino, a ruined knob of garlic, Parmesan, olive oil, several bottles of red wine. After a bath I prepare a goblet of wine with a plate of fruit and cheese and read till I’m slightly drunk. I’ve found the thing I’m looking for. Joseph Brodsky. Not the poems, but his book on Venice. He talks of the city in winter, how it is like Greta Garbo swimming, about the streets – how they are like library shelves, about feeling like a cat and saying meow!

After reading Watermark I go to visit Mr Brodsky. His grave is overrun with rose bushes. Not far from him lie two compatriots – Diaghilev and Stravinsky. I feel the beginning of something changing in the San Michele cemetery under those long archways of cypress, amongst the cool brick walls and tombs.

How different a burial is from a burning.

I go looking for the members of my missing family who drowned in the sinking of the SS Bolivian on 9 April 1919. But I do not know their names. Tapetto, Bruno, Camilla, Felicita, Emilio, Pio. Could any of these people be related to me?

There are seagulls everywhere. They are loud and huge like big flying cats. One of them swoops over me, lets loose a spray of shit and then springs away, squawking madly.

I stop at the grave of a young ballerina. Her family entombed her pink satin slippers along with her. Expectantes Resurrectionem.

The roses are in full bloom. Red and white. And there’s a cacophony of birdsong. Palm trees seem incongruous, but here they are, their roots entangled in the dust of bones.

Before I’d left to come here, Kavitha Raman had told me about a temple in Kerala where people went to find out about their lives. All you needed to supply them with was your name and date of birth. And then a priest would disappear into the archives and return with a papyrus bearing all the details of your meagre life. Imagine the folly of living in the face of an idea like this! All the destinies of all the people in the world predetermined and inked. A stranger could read the book of your life and tell you things you didn’t even know.