A morning behind the Royal Palace with the squirrels and a marble head wearing a pigeon, then down to Piazza San Carlo, where half the galleries were shut for August and one show stopped me dead.
I could not sleep, so I walked Turin awake. A Roman gate at first light, a mad stone dome, the Mole up close, the river holding a bridge upside down, and my favourite thing in the whole city, a little green bull that spits cold water.
Six days of Venice water and then the train sets you down in Turin, where the whole world suddenly goes straight. A first evening in the old Savoy capital, one bronze count, a dark dome, and a very good dog.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.
Before Redentore’s fireworks fill Venice, an artist walks the empty Grand Canal and Castello’s quiet campos at dawn, sketching a rowing boatman, a hidden Baroque church, and a dog asleep in a moored boat.
Before dawn, Venice belongs to nobody. A solo walk from the Grand Canal to colour-drenched Burano, caught between a sudden lagoon shower and a single white brushstroke that said everything the photographer had been chasing all week.
A wander through the Venice Biennale’s Giardini, from a folded gold ribbon and a piano under a rippling ceiling to feathered figures in a colonnade, plus the 1907 story of how nations came to build permanent pavilions here.
Before the Biennale crowds arrive, a dawn walk to the Arsenale, once the largest shipyard in pre-industrial Europe, where revealing a shipbuilding secret meant execution. Now filled with contemporary art instead of warships.
Before the Venice Biennale crowds and heat arrive, one early riser crosses from Mestre to Dorsoduro at first light, finding empty canals, leaning campaniles and a Grand Canal all to himself.
