No, I really can’t remember it, but I’ve since introduced innumerable people to their first sights of the city, and have greatly enjoyed their almost invariable ecstasies! Well, I have several favourites. I am fondest of my book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, because I pretentiously think of it as the nearest to pure art, and the truest to my own self. On the other hand I cannot help being proud of my big imperial trilogy, Pax Britannica, because I suspect (well, hope anyway) that it will always be read as historical evidence – one citizen’s personal responses to the end of an epoch. And, yes, I rather like my book Fisher’s Face, about an Edwardian admiral with whom I propose to have an affair in the afterlife. ButI like most of them, really, faults and all … They are friends, like my late cat Ibsen. It is also a bit of a historical guide as it was originally written 60 or more years ago. Morris updated it a few times, but the last of those was almost 30 years ago, and even in as apparently timeless cities as Venice, things change, so again little use as a practical tool. Venice sound bed from recordings by producer, BBC Sound FX library and BBC Radio 3’s Slow Radio: Venice Between the Bells.

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit … sat down to muse. But just don't expect to finish it. You may well do. Or you may find, like I did, that your interest wanes after a while. But that’s not to say that Winterson didn’t build on other versions of Venice. Jan Morris provided one of her key texts, and The Passion glows with its influence. Morris’s Venice isn’t a normal guidebook. It provides a reasonable amount of useful information about history and topography. I’m also pretty sure that its facts are solid and the personal experiences that Morris recounts are real. But, more than anything, to read this book is to fill your mind with fantasy and illusion. There’s magic even when she describes the real city, the day-to-day life and, say, the sound of an oar moving through water or a removal lorry waiting outside someone’s front door on a platform of barges. The book, first published in 1960, was originally titled 'The World of Venice', and the richness of its description makes Venice feel like an enclosed world, intoxicating, enthralling and claustrophobic and crowded: ( "the little subsidiary passages that creep padded and muffled among the houses, like the runs of city weasels.") This Venice as a place different and apart from the rest of the world, even from its own hinterland, the idea of it as a place of intrigue and carnival, which is a holiday from normal life more so than most cultural city destinations. (Although the recent level of prominence of the carnival and its masks for tourism are apparently a fairly recent innovation).The British Army took me to Venice at the end of the second world war, and for two months I had the duty of helping to run all the requisitioned motorboats of the city, before I went on with my regiment to Egypt and Palestine. It was the best present I ever had, a marvellous introduction to the city, and I have been attached to Venice ever since, writing four books about it plus a couple of million articles. Johns, Derek (2 October 2016). "Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 March 2018. a b c d "Jan Morris obituary | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 23 November 2021.

I am in Venice, in search of Jan Morris, the great British travel writer and historian who died last November at the age of 94. I am here with my younger sister, Virginia, who has gamely agreed to a Morris-inspired itinerary. Our guidebook is not Fodor’s or Lonely Planet but Morris’s own The World of Venice, published in 1960 and still in print today. It is a rhapsodic book, zesty and beguiling, about this “lonely hauteur,” this “jumbled, higgledy-piggledy mass,” this “God-built city”: Venezia. Here, “all feels light, spacious, carefree, crystalline,” Morris writes with characteristic aplomb, “as though the decorators of the city had mixed their paints in champagne, and the masons laced their mortar with lavender.” A mesh of nets patterns the walls of a fisherman's islet, and a restless covey of boats nuzzles its water-gate." (Landfall) Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.With the Duke of Edinburgh in 2013 during a reception to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Hillary’s ascent of Everest. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images Italie, Hillel (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, author and transgender pioneer, dies at 94". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. Jan Morris naturalised as Welsh and wrote The Matter of Wales. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

While we talk, from time to time a small fluttering bird taps its beak on the window as if to gain entry. “Do you hear the bird tapping?” Morris asks. “It used to portend death didn’t it? We have it every day at different windows.” Propped against one wall is a photograph of the summit of Everest taken by the Indian air force who flew over the expedition as it made its last assault on the summit. Morris points out the place she climbed to at 22,000 feet. “That wasn’t a bad story was it?”Derek Johns: Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, London: Faber & Faber, 2016, ISBN 978-0-571-33163-5 You first travelled with the British army in the second world war. Did that change the way you see the world? I am not much good on food, which has never greatly interested me. I assume Venetian run-of-the mill restaurant food nowadays is often poor because of the demands of mass tourism: but I like to think it has always been boring because the citizenry had more interesting things to think of (besides living in the middle of the sea, which presumably limited their choice of victuals …)