She is helpful most of the time, but irritates a lot of the time. She is a “big picture” person – a real asset when setting goals and directions, but not a lot of help, indeed downright useless when in one of those crisis situations when you need accurate, definitive information right then and there. Her name is Barbara but is also known to us as Valerie and Pamela. Maybe we should have engaged Maria or Valentina whose command of the Italian language, doubtless would have been better. “Park in Mestre, it’s cheaper” people would advise, “then just catch the train across the causeway to San Lucia”. “Right” I said to myself, “sounds like a plan”. So Jen, Valerie and I set out for Venice.

Allegedly, Pamela could lock on to six satellites simultaneously and fix our position within a metre or so. We were assured that she had made this journey many times before so I had no reason to believe that finding the parceggio stazione adjacent to the Mestre railway station would be so exhausting – but it was. If only she had the navigation skills to know where Viale Stazione 10 was, but she didn’t. I’d send her back to Rome if I could but she came with the car so we are stuck with her for the duration. The wierd thing was that early in our relationship, whenever I ignored her obviously errant instructions, I felt guilty and said sorry out loud – but I’m over it now.

Salvatore is larger than life. Of robust build, a kind face and far better broken English than my broken Italian. He sells coffee and cakes in a shop beside a cute little bridge that goes over a canal. If you’ve been to Venice you probably know which one I mean. He has a friend in Wooloomooloo who he visited for a month a few years ago – his recall of things Australian was amazing. The half hour we spent sitting talking together in his sunny cafe was mutually, very pleasurable.

A handsome, fit young gondolier resplendent in his tight black pants (steady Jen), black and white striped tee shirt and stiff brimmed cane hat with red trim, was standing in the sunshine on the apex of a back canal bridge waiting for his next fare. He smiled at Jen and asked if we would like a half hour ride for €80. After politely declining, we chatted a bit and learned that gondoliers rotate their stations around the city so that everyone gets their fair share of the work. There are about 500 gondoliers in the city and it is one of the most coveted and well paid jobs in Venice.

It sounds trite, but Venice IS full of romance. We saw San Marco in the afternoon featuring magnificent facades with arches draped in voluminous venetian curtains which shaded string ensembles comprised of five or six talented musicians playing Vivaldi; lovers in each other’s arms standing on canal bridges under soft gold street lamps and couples, night-time window shopping at Tiffanys, Prada and Bvlgari. Happily, all this romance wasn’t missed by us. One particularly beautiful afternoon, a gondola with a piano accordionist on board playing beautiful love songs, passed below our open third storey bedroom window. For a long time the music floated back between the buildings as the gondola slowly plied its way through the quiet waterways.

Like a lot of tourist towns, Venice has its fair share of souvenir shops. Gaudy carnivale masks abound, interspersed with a multiplicity of Murano glass bottles and tiny Rialto Bridges. So Jen and I did what we always do and got off the beaten track. We walked and walked and walked. We could see into peoples’ homes through breezy open windows. We saw Nonna’s with their grandchildren playing on terraces overlooking quiet watery streets and we saw courtyards and gardens that clearly belonged to obscenely wealthy people.

More down to earth (or more accurately mud), Venice features the most complicated renovation jobs you could ever imagine - where nothing is level, plumb or square and every bit of spoil has to be removed in small buckets by hand out of the building to a moored barge. The bedroom floors of our smallish renovated hotel slope approximately 100mm in two directions and the patterns on the very fashionable Venetian fabric wall coverings (like wallpaper) don’t even get close to matching up at the corners. If it were anywhere else in the world, you would immediately call reception and demand another room or a refund – but this is Venice. You come here because it is so broken; to sit and admire the utter uniqueness of the place; to see what, for centuries, the fuss was all about - the centre of the then, trading and thus financial universe. It defies description really, it is an experience rather than a destination.

I expected a big experience out of Venice and I was in no way disappointed. I just didn’t expect it to be the experience that I got. When our time was up, we really, really didn’t want to leave.

Many thanks to Helene and Gerald for loaning me their copy of “Venice” a fascinating and thorough documentary made by Francesco Da Musto, an nth generation Venetian with significant insights.