Venice always reminds me of Poe’s ‘The Assignation’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, and all the other dark, seductive and quite beautiful tales I read as a young man, and which dull reality never managed to hold a guttering candle up to.

The ancient city’s gloomy, baroque facades and winding alleyways form a substructure for the imagination to work on and people its inky midnight canals  and crumbling palazzos with the Montresors and Fortunatos of the mind.

Around every corner you might come across a desperate lover eloping with his beautiful, veiled Marchesa on a jet-black gondola, or witness a dagger being sunk into the breast of some late reveller and hear coins rattle across the cobbles.

The rhythmic taps made by a building gang working through the night sound like bricks being laid systematically and diabolically in a cellar deep beneath your feet, and the tinkling made by a distant horse’s bridle could be the bells on a doomed fool’s felt hat.

In my nocturnal wanderings I half expect to meet my Lady Ligeia around the next bend, but that’s in another tale and another life. Besides, I’ve forgotten the ending, or whether it even has one.