Some mornings the body just gives up on sleep and hands you the city for free. I was out before five, before the water taxis, before the coffee machines, back when Venice belongs to nobody and you can hear your own feet on the stone. Down by the station the Grand Canal had gone soft and pink, and the big green dome of San Simeone Piccolo, the first thing every train traveller sees of this city, sat there catching the very first of the light. Today’s list had one word written on it. Colour.
The back lanes at that hour are all yours. I turned a corner into a narrow calle, a yellow wall on one side, worn brick on the other, and the only other soul awake was a man walking a black dog towards the light at the far end. No rush in either of them. I stood still and let the two of them get small in the frame. Give me an empty street and a dog over a famous view any day of the week, that is just the way I am wired.
I worked my way down to the Fondamente Nove, the long northern edge of Venice where the boats leave for the islands. The sun was coming up hard over the lagoon by then, laying a line of fire straight down a rickety timber jetty, ropes coiled fat on the pilings, a low island smudged grey out on the water. This is the good stuff. Not postcard Venice, working Venice, the one that smells of diesel and salt and just gets on with its day while the tourists sleep.
Then out across the water to Burano, and there it was, the colour I had come for. A whole island that flatly refuses to be beige. Every little house painted a different shout of a colour, butter yellow next to hot pink next to a blue you could nearly taste, all of it doubled again in the still green canal. The story goes the fishermen painted them this way so they could find their own front door through the lagoon fog, each colour a boundary line between one family and the next. It works. You could never lose your house here.
I had maybe twenty minutes of that before the sky changed its mind. The blue closed over, the light went flat, and a proper shower came sweeping up the canal, dimpling the water, rattling on the tarpaulins over the moored boats. Funny thing, the colour goes muddy and quiet in the wet, all that shouting turned down to a murmur. I stood under an eave and filmed it instead of hiding from it. Burano has made lace famous right across Europe since the 1400s, and even its rain seems to fall in embroidery.
Back in the city for the afternoon, dodging the crowds, I did the thing I always do and stopped dead in front of a wall. Just a wall. Plaster peeled right back to the old brick underneath, cream and rust and a hundred greys, a shaft of hard sun cutting the whole thing in half. People flowed past me like I had lost the plot. But this is where my eye actually lives, in the grey and the grain, not the grand stuff. I work in black and white, and a wall like that is already halfway to a drawing.
I ducked out of the heat through an archway and found a quiet cloister, a green garden ringed by an old arcade, a leaning brick bell tower tipping gently over the rooftops the way half the towers in this sinking city seem to. There were sculptures out on the grass, pale animal shapes standing about in the sun like they were waiting on something. A little exhibition, tucked into an old convent, no crowd, no queue, no noise. The best rooms in Venice are always the ones nobody is pointing a phone at.
And inside, the piece that stopped me cold. A big black and white photograph, a face turned to profile against the dark, and one broad sweep of white paint dragged clean across it like a wave breaking. That was the whole work. One gesture. Everything I have been chasing all week, movement without the fuss, put down in a single confident stroke by somebody who clearly did not sit there overthinking it. I stood far too long in front of it. Two islands, one downpour, a wall, and I still have not opened the sketchbook. Filling up nicely, though. More soon.
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.
