“You mean canal sick, don’t you?” I asked, and she actually smiled.

“Over on that side is the accademia. That white marble building beside the bridge. If you were studying art in Italy, this is where you would want to go. La Accademia di Belle Arti. The Academy of Fine Arts. And it houses the finest collection of Venetian paintings, too. We shall definitely want to see it.”

As she was speaking, we turned off the Grand Canal into a small side canal and pulled up at some well-worn steps. As if by magic, men came running out, hauled us up from the gondola and then grabbed our luggage. When Aunt H. went to pay the gondolier, she reacted as if she was horrified at the amount quoted.

In her stilted Italian, she asked our hotel porters if the amount was correct or if we were being taken advantage of.

“You see two defenceless Englishwomen,” she said, reverting to English, “and you think you can rob them of their meagre savings. Would you behave like this to your own mother? Your own grandmother?” She repeated the gist of this in Italian.

The gondolier looked sheepish. The hotel men smiled. Then the gondolier shrugged.

“Very well,” he said. “I charge you only two hundred lire. But just this once, because you have travelled far and the young lady is exhausted.”

Triumphant, Aunt H. strode into the foyer of a less-than-palatial yellow-painted building with green shutters, where a silver-haired man came forward, arms open, to greet her.

“Dear, dear Signorina Marchmont. You have returned to us. A thousand welcomes.”

I could see now why Aunt Hortensia liked this place, if she was greeted in this way. Frankly, I had been disappointed that we were not staying in one of the palazzos on the Grand Canal, but Aunt Hortensia had said, more than once, “There is only one place to stay in Venice, and that is the Pensione Regina. And that is because it has a garden. When one is hot and tired from sightseeing, one can sit in the shade and drink a citron pressé .”

We were taken up a flight of marble stairs into a large ornate corner room with windows on two sides, a painted wooden ceiling and furniture that looked as if it had come from a museum. At least the two beds looked normal enough, with their crisp white sheets, and there was a desk and chair in the front window, which looked out on to the garden, with a sliver of a view of the Grand Canal beyond. I went over to the window, opened it and gazed out. The scent of jasmine rose to greet me.

“Ah yes,” Aunt H. said when she had inspected our bathroom. “Most satisfactory.”

As I stood at the window, bells began to ring, their sound echoing out across the canals. A gondola glided past; this time the gondolier was young and handsome. I felt my spirits rise. I was in Venice, my first time in Europe. I was going to make the most of it.