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“When I went to Venice – my dream became my address,” Marcel Proust wrote famously in one of his letters. To write about Venice is banal. But it is even more banal not to write about it.

After my many visits to this amazing city, I came to regard it as an ageing, yet still graceful, woman suffering from insomnia and dragging restlessly around the house in her worn-out, loose-fitting slippers in the night. Soft splashes of water against the ancient Venetian stones are like the shuffling of slippers across the floor…

Yes, let’s face it: Venice is geriatric and slowly dying. This 800-year-old town-sized toy was never intended to last that long. Its founders, the spice-trading Venetian merchants, lived by the principle, later formulated by Madame de Pompadour, apres nous le deluge (after us the deluge), and were successful in translating it into reality (or rather into unreality, for Venice is so thoroughly unreal). They built this baroque equivalent of Disneyland for their own delight and hedonism, without giving much thought to the future.

Unable to withstand the pressure of time, Venice is now crumbling apart. Its underwater supports, made of Siberian cedar, can no longer resist the rot. The walls of the palaces on the banks of the Grand Canal are covered with cracks and moss. Priceless paintings inside are being eaten by moisture. Fastidious and down-to-earth American visitors are right: Venice stinks. Who wouldn’t after 800 years of slow decay?

And yet, Venice is like no other place in the world.

At sunset, when the opaque, mica-like water in the canals begins gleaming suddenly with a magical translucent glow of its own, as if slowly, almost reluctantly, discharging the sunlight it has accumulated during the day, when blinds fall like thick black eye-lids of an Italian beauty on the gaping eye-sockets of tired old houses, when gentle tolling of distant church bells mingles with the soft sucking chorus of lovers’ kisses – there suddenly comes a whiff of fresh sea breeze, a reminder of the days when Venice signified ships, exotic ports and new trade routes to be explored.

On a par with moisture and rot, the walls of modern Venice are being eaten methodically by the voracious eyes of tourists, mainly couples, coming here from all over the world in search of romance. Venice is romance guaranteed. No one knows how many families have been ruined and how many love affairs moulded by this tender Venetian sea breeze, full of lust and libido.

To come to Venice as a loner – as I have done on numerous occasions – is a torture and should probably be made punishable as a minor breach of public (Venetian) order. The place is so overwhelmingly “romantic” that you feel an irresistible urge to share it with someone you love.

However, it’s not all romance for the locals, whose number keeps dwindling unstoppably: between twenty and thirty thousand native Venetians leave their city every year in search of a more mundane existence. What is happening behind these tightly shut blinds, which make Venetian houses look so lifeless and aloof after dark?

The truth is that everyday life in Venice is agony. The city’s sewage system is in a deplorable state. Antediluvian rubbish-collecting boats are not coping with the tons of waste that keep floating in the canals like little drifting archipelagos of empty Coke cans, potato peelings, shreds of paper and other refuse of slovenly modern civilisation.

One of the main reasons for the locals’ exodus is that in Venice one cannot drive a car, and a car-less Italian is as unsustainable as a beer-less German, a Vodaphone-less Finn, or a camcorder-less Japanese.

True, some young Venetian males do try to impress their dark-eyed girlfriends by tearing along the canals in their motorboats at breakneck speed, with a roaring ghetto blaster astern. But even this popular way of local courting is growing increasingly difficult with tightening of water-traffic regulations.

After a hapless American tourist drowned in the Grand Canal, when her gondola was overturned by a wave raised by a passing motorboat several years ago, the Venetian water police clamped down on reckless drivers, or rather sailors. Speed limits were introduced. Special parking havens for boats were established. Boat parking tickets were being issued.

In short, life is tough for the resident Venetians - that is why they are leaving, and no town, not even Venice, can survive without locals.

The only natives who still seem to be prospering are luggage porters and gondoliers (as of last year, the latter require official licences). An unwary tourist is always at risk of having his shoulder bag snatched from him by an overzealous and uncalled-for porter the moment he steps of the airport shuttle boat on to Venetian soil. The bag would then be mounted onto a huge (and empty) luggage trolley, capable of carrying a ship container, and taken a couple of hundred yards to a hotel – for the price close to that of a business-class plane ticket from London.

As to the gondoliers, I came to realise why they are were all so cheerful and always ready to burst into a song, despite the fact that most of them had clearly had both of their ears trodden on by a bear (a Russian idiom to describe the people with no ear for music). Prices of gondola trips are so exorbitant that only reckless honeymooners and rich wastrels seem to be able to afford them. Stone-faced and uncomfortable, off they float along the canals to the accompaniment of squeaky “Santa Lucia-a!”

Like every reasonably large city, Venice has its morning and afternoon rush hours, flotillas of multipurpose boats chugging up and down the Grand Canal: taxi boats, fruit and vegetable boats, fireboats, bread delivery boats, even black-and-red hearse boats. On board the vaporettos, locals can be easily identified by not looking around themselves like troubled hens, but talking on their mobile phones, or burying their faces in a fresh issue of Il Messaggero or Il Gazzettino (Venetians – like most Italians - are very politically astute). They are likely to be catching up on a yet another corruption scandal in the highest echelons of Italy’s power.

I remember seeing obituaries for Bertino Graxi, a former Italian prime minister, implicated with Mafia connections, put out on display in the cobbled streets of the colourful and almost tourist-free Venice’s Old Jewish Ghetto, next to some medieval stone sign-plates warning against the use of foul language, about ten years ago. Underneath the posters – ageless hook-nosed women were chatting loudly on the benches and boys were forgetfully kicking the ball against a synagogue wall, with imminent collateral damage to the windows of the neighbouring houses.

The curious thing was that Graxi was then still alive, and the obituaries were but a sign of the Venetians’ contempt for the disgraced politician who had let them all down. The natives of Venice have always been known as somewhat ‘picturesque’ and demonstrative (“In Venice one never loses the sense that life is being staged for the onlooker”, as noted by Jonathan Raban), but also straightforward and uncompromising.

Even if Venice – as environmentalists assert – will be submerged by the sea in the next 200-300 years, that peculiar Venetian spirit is not going to die. You can feel it now on the ever deserted and overgrown with wild grass island of St Georgio Maggiore, just a three-minute vaporetto ride from St Marco Square, teaming with flocks of tourists and pigeons. You can sense it in the Giardini area, the venue of the famous Biennale, where incongruous avant-garde sculptures from all over the globe stand in the park, scaring away fussy Venetian sparrows. You can feast on it in an ordinary al fresco trattoria, off tourist tracks, where you will expose yourself to the obstreperous exhibitionism of Venetian street life (when Venetians shout at each other, it’s normal; when they start whispering, it means anger).

You can savour it in the old Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro, where Lord Byron once lived in a monastic cell, studying the beautifully intricate Armenian language, with all its guttural gurgling sounds and twelve noun cases: “The visitor [to the monastery] will be convinced that there are other and better things even in this life,” he wrote there. There are few better things in this life than Venice - this unique old city on 117 islands in the Adriatic Sea.

At the peril of sounding banal, I have to conclude that if we are given the doubtful happiness of being born, we must at least see Venice.

IN THE KNOW

Is it you?
Definitely so! Life is not quite complete without seeing Venice. And since it is likely to disappear from the face of the earth in 200-300 years, you’d better hurry. Make the dream your address – even if for a couple of days!

When to go
My favourite month for visiting Venice is January. The town then is almost free of queues and tourist hordes, endemic to it at all other times of the year. It opens up and feels as if belongs to you alone. You can explore it at your own pace (with an umbrella in your hand). The downsides are intermittent rain (I actually quite enjoy looking at the canals from underneath my umbrella: their surface, covered with rain-drops, starts resembling a heavily pock-marked, yet still smiling, face) and mist. But, depending on your own mood and attitude, even these can be turned into advantages.

Something Extra
Do not miss the island of Burano – a smaller, almost toy-like, version of Venice only 40 minutes by vaporetto from the city centre. It is an incredibly picturesque fishing village, with canals instead of streets – like in Venice itself), also famous for its lace-making.

Value factor
Venice can be very expensive, particularly in high season. If you travel on a shoestring, avoid having meals (or drinks) anywhere near the Grand Canal and the main touristy “Broadway” – from the ferrovia (railway station) to San Marco Square. Opt instead for an unpretentious local trattoria off tourist tracks, and you will be pleasantly surprised by both the ambience and the quality of food. To say nothing of (very reasonable) prices. Do not buy anything from street hawkers or souvenir stalls. Do not entrust your luggage to a self-proclaimed street porter (see above). Those striving for luxury and opulence, however, must bear in mind that Venice boasts the world’s best (in my opinion) hotel – “Danieli” (vaporetto stop San Zaccaria) – a former residence of a 15th-century doge. The concierge there is a real wizard, who will take care of every possible whim of yours.

Getting around
Cars are not allowed anywhere in Venice, except on the Lido. For those arriving by car, the best (and the least expensive) alternative is to park it in the near-by town of Mestre (in the railway station car park) and to take a train (a 10 minute-journey) to Venice. The best way to explore Venice is on foot. I would strongly recommend getting seriously lost in the town’s narrow back lanes which is not at all hard.

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