Watermark: An Essay on Venice | 
They expected to be hurt, perhaps badly hurt; they expected the deafening – so close to their ears! – sound of a shot. And they squinted. Because the human repertoire of responses is so limited! What was coming to them was death, not pain; yet their bodies couldn't distinguish one from the other.
For someone with such a long record of residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn't realised that beauty can't be targeted, that it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits.
At sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne.
You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet
In winter you wake in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset where vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky.
One is the what one looks at – well, at least partially. The medieval belief that a pregnant woman wishing her child to be beautiful must look at beautiful objects is not so naïve given the quality of dreams one dreams it in this city.
In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artefacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
