each time he manouevred us round another corner of the labyrinth. From time to time he pointed out an interesting sight that we were passing—the Church of St. Madelena, the house of the explorers Antonio and Nicola Zeno, the palazzos of a half a dozen dukes whose names I didn’t know—buildings whose facades were set with marble carved in deep relief above columns and colonnades shaped with those strange pointed arches that looked as though they’d come straight out of the Arabian Nights . . . a legacy, I supposed, from the days when the trade winds had carried to Venice tall galleons laden with spices and silks from the East.
And then, as we entered a narrow canal where a peeling pink building with iron-barred windows rose out of its dappled reflection in water the colour of olives, our gondolier tapped Rupert once on the shoulder.
“Ecco,” he told him. “La Casetta Fiorita.”
And I knew then why Rupert had wanted to bring me this way, in the gondola.
Leaning forward in my seat, I took a closer look up at the crumbling ‘Little House of Flowers’ where Galeazzo D’Ascanio had spent his years in Venice. He had written of this house in The Season of Storms, the book of poems Rupert had given me for my birthday, and I wished I had the book in my hands now so I could read the lines again and get their full effect, but the book was still packed in my suitcase back at the hotel, and all I could remember was one fragment of a verse in which he’d called the Casetta Fiorita ‘that birthplace of our passion.’
I had pictured it quite differently, a grander house than this one. . . but I wasn’t disappointed. This was better, really. More romantic.
I couldn’t see flowers, but twisting vines trailed down one side of the building and clung to the curving stone balcony two storeys up, from whose window, I thought, Galeazzo had first glimpsed his Celia as she passed by in a gondola, as I was passing now. I sighed, and looking up I fancied I saw something for an instant break the shadows at the window, like a ghostly face forgotten, gazing out.
“No one lives here anymore,” said Rupert sadly. “A shame, but there it is. It isn’t safe.”
“Why not? Is it sinking?”
“I should think that would be a large part of it, yes. All of Venice is sinking. But part of it, too, is the age of the house. This one’s ancient, you know. Thirteenth-century.”
I shaded my eyes with one hand as I studied the structure, imagining what it must have looked like all those years ago; what sights it must have seen. “It’s a pity he doesn’t restore this house, too.”
“Sorry?”
“Galeazzo’s grandson.”
“I’m sure that he would, if he owned it.”
“Wasn’t this part of his inheritance, then?”
Rupert, with a shake of his head, informed me that Galeazzo D’Ascanio had only rented the Casetta Fiorita. “It belonged, I believe, to an Austrian financier, and when the First World War got going it was sequestrated—”
“Sequestrated?”
“Confiscated,” he said, simplifying, “by the government, who rented it to Galeazzo, furnished.”
“Hardly fair on the Austrian,” I remarked.
Rupert, with a patient shrug, reminded me that war was rarely fair. “Though he had his revenge. He trained as an aviator and got himself selected for the squadron that bombed Venice. Apparently he took delight in dropping bombs on his old neighbours. Even hit his own house a few times. See?” He pointed out the scars along the roofline as we glided underneath the jutting balcony, where a carved stone lion’s head appeared in the tangle of vines, blindly snarling.
My initial sympathy for the displaced Austrian vanished. “What a bloody stupid thing to do.”
“I’m sure it didn’t help the house much,” Rupert said, squinting as he focussed his lens on the lion’s head. “And it would be lovely, as you say, if someone would restore it. But Venetian laws are strict about what can and can’t be done to