I passed a lovely white palazzo on my right and came to the long, open space that was the Campo Santo Stefano, where I remembered sitting and sketching long ago on the day that had ended with my falling into the canal. This was the real Venice, I thought. There were women pausing to talk with shopping baskets on their arm, small children running squealing around the fountain, pigeons strutting hopefully, a cat slinking out of an alleyway. I watched a woman filling a water jug from the pump, reminding me that not all homes had running water yet. But it had a good, family feel to it. It took me a while and asking several times to find the address, because, as I had discovered in Venice, one can’t get there from here. The route involved going down to the church, doubling back, crossing a canal and ending up almost where I had started, not too far from the Grand Canal. The building wasn’t exactly prepossessing—crumbling pink paint revealing brickwork beneath, faded blue shutters on the windows. But there were geraniums in window boxes as well as washing flapping on a line above. I saw then that there were four doorbells. It was flats, then. I rang the one with the name Martinelli beside it.

“Sì ? Cosa vuoi?” came a sharp voice. “What do you want?”

In my stumbling Italian, I explained I was a student from England who’d come about the room.

“Allora. Come up,” she said, and the door was buzzed open to a central stairwell. A flight of stone steps rose ahead of me, lit, it seems, by a skylight somewhere at the top of the building. Signora Martinelli was on the third floor, and it appeared there was no lift. At least it would be good for my legs! I started up, past the first floor, past the second, where a dog barked at me from inside a door, and finally to the third, where I found myself disgustingly out of breath. I paused to collect myself before I tapped timidly at the door. It was opened by a woman who looked as alarming as that nun had the year before. She was dressed entirely in black, her iron-grey hair scraped back severely into a bun. She was a large woman with meaty arms. These were now folded across an ample bosom as she eyed me up and down.

“You are not what I expected,” she said. “You don’t look like a student.”

“No, I’m older than most,” I said. “I have been a schoolteacher, but I have been given the chance to renew my art studies at the accademia for a year.”

“Well, I don’t expect you’ll make as much mess and noise as most of the ones who show up on my doorstep,” she said. “You’d better come in. I am Signora Martinelli, and you are?”

“Signorina Browning,” I said.

“Not married? Never married?”