Down through the overcast, peering through windows threaded with windblown condensation, we first made out the landscape of the Po valley: yellow fields and red roofs, straight railways and wandering rivers. Venice airport proper is on the coast of the great Venetian lagoon, but we had saved money by flying to Treviso, an hour inland by bus. However, unlike seemingly every other Ryanair customer in Europe, we had actually kept our seats.

From above, Venice is shaped roughly like a fish, with the Grand Canal winding through it and accentuating the cut of the pectoral fin where the Basilica di Santa Maria sits. The tail is the Arsenale district, with the Doge’s palace and San Marco nestling in the fish’s belly. Above, the cemetery island San Michele floats by like a discarded square of polystyrene. I can’t work out where the Giudecca fits in this metaphor; possibly it’s a friendly eel.  At the fish’s mouth, the cruise ships moor, and above their docks the causeway to the mainland brings in people by road, rail and rubber-tyred tram.

It was a grey, hazy day, and we crossed the causeway in a spray-filled breeze, with docks and infrastructure crowding the skyline to the right, and the green waters of the lagoon stretching away to the left. Ahead the city was a broad, low sprawl of roofs, the towers rising above it an intriguing mix of styles, neither Italianate nor Byzantine but a mixture of both. Our airbnb was in the Cannaregio area, near the old ghetto which gave the world that term (somewhere near the fish’s forehead? Alright, I’ll stop.) It’s a quiet district, where the few remaining Venetians who actually live in the city tend to roost; our host was one of them, and he led us – through the crowds, across little arched bridges, along canals full of little boats, past glorious mansions with cracked old stucco faces- to our fabulously opulent lodgings (marble terrazzo floor, walnut furniture, gilt-framed mirrors – and this was, genuinely, at the cheap end).

What is left to say about Venice? Marble palaces slowly crumbling into grey-green canals, gleaming black gondolas poled by men in stripy shirts or moored between even stripier barbershop-poles, tiny alleys you almost have to walk sideways through, glittering carnival masks and twisted glass wonders behind shop windows. Any decent art gallery will have at least one Canaletto knockoff showing the glorious city on the water, and very little has changed since they were painted. It’s everything one expects: rarely more, but never any less. This ridiculous, impossible, architecturally unlikely fantasia was a massive player in the Mediterranean for no less than a thousand years, took on the Byzantines and the Ottomans in stand-up war, enabled Crusades and established its mystique as a tourist destination while the concept of tourism was still being invented. Eaten by the French, then the Habsburgs, and finally the Italian state fabricated in the 19th century, it’s less unique now, perhaps, than ever before, but is still an absolutely singular place.

We wandered out at dusk, exploring the back streets with no particular aim; Fran bought a dress more suited to the Venetian chill at the “everything €9”fashion shops (there are, bizarrely, dozens of similar places infesting this otherwise incredibly expensive city). Dinner started with a local specialty, pasta in cuttlefish ink: despite looking like a plated crude oil disaster and leaving you with a pronounced “goth lipstick” effect, it’s actually very tasty. We chatted to a retired Dutch couple who came back regularly for the biennial art exhibition – they’d been back in Venice five times and ate at this place every time (a recommendation!). To round off our first evening, we walked through the dark alleys of the central district to the Rialto. There’s no menace to Venice (excuse the rhyme); even the darkest alley holds nothing worse than a mild urine scent or an unusually insistent hawker trying to flog you a selfie stick. It is, however, an unbelievably easy place to get lost in; there are no visible landmarks and a great many routes are blind turns off squares where the casual ambler can’t tell if there’s a way forward until they walk there. Even with all the helpful signs saying PER S. MARCO, the only practical ways to navigate are a GPS smartphone or a lifetime of practice.

Still, we came to the Rialto district – a large (somewhat overrated) bridge, banks thronged with attractive (somewhat overpriced) restaurants – and after a rejuvenating coffee took a vaporetto back up the Grand Canal. The long, low ferryboats – vaporetto means “little steamer”, though they’re diesel now – are the only practical public transport in a city with no roads and no railways, and although expensive and crowded at all hours of the day are a very enjoyable way to travel. When the Grand Canal rolls past, the ticket price is justified by the view as much as by the convenience, as all the buildings turn their most elaborate faces onto the water. The dark arches of the fish markets, the striped poles where the gondolas moor, the immense white Casino with its private red-carpeted pier, the giant white hands of some mad art exhibit rising from the water to caress the facade of a mansion, all glide by twice: once clear-cut and starkly floodlit, once shimmering and broken by the ripples of the ferry’s wake.