PREFACE by Jonathan Keates Lasting a thousand years, the independent state of Venice liked to style itself "The Most Serene Republic." As a realm of fiction, however, the place has always been denied any sort of serenity. Writers have seized instead on the city as a domain of unease and moral decay, dwelling on the atmostphere of faded splendour, vanity and excess conveyed by the grandeur of its panoramas amid palaces, churches and canals. A built environment of unmatched architectural magnificence rasied, as it seems, from nothing, in the middle of an Adriatic lagoon, has spurred the imagination of novelists and short-story writers to exploit its resonantly paradoxical qualities to the utmost. Artists like Proust and Henry James meet this challenge by making Venice the natural backdrop for illusion, deceit and ambiguity. Vernon Lee, on the other hand, in "A Wicked Voice," plays a variation on a unique local tradition of ghosts and haunting, while Baron Corvo takes merciless revenge on the city's expatriate British community for its pretentiousness, insularity and self-aggrandizement. Jeanette Winterson's The Passion shapes a fantasy Venice from a location not yet experienced at first hand and Daphne du Maurier, for whom the very name of the place was a code word for sexual unorthodoxy, invests the Venetian streetscape with a wondrously oblique menace. And Casanova? Ah, Casanova .

Those famous memoirs he wrote at the end of his life--how true exactly are they? What his unique narratives seem to tell us is that Venice colours and fashions its special kind of truth and that we should enjoy this on his own terms, seductive and entrancing as these always are. Never mind reality when La Serenissima beckons.