There, next to the shuttered kiosk, was the first bridge: stepped, balustraded, the black night water slopping beneath it, a rakish police launch moored to one side. Beyond, half-visible through the thick fog, lay a stone path, a portico, another bridge.
At that moment, a group of students came running across the bridge, through the portico, down the stone path. It was two in the morning, but I could see immediately that there was nothing sinister or fugitive in their speed: this was high spirits. Human, energetic, timeless: they could have been Capulets. Their voices filled the air, stilled by the fog. Then they were gone in a tumble of footsteps which fell away like blown leaves. At last: the city of voices and footsteps. I'd waited forty years for this.
The next day, somewhere near the post office, I found myself following a path between high buildings. It became a dark, covered alleyway; I stopped, for perhaps the sixth time, to check my map. A man with a stick was following me, swaddled in a heavy black coat; I could tell at a glance his soul was unquiet. As he clattered past me, he muttered what sounded like curses. His nose was aquiline; his face imperious and sinewy: Doge Marco Barbarigo as painted by Tintoretto. He wore sandals, though; his feet were bare. I watched him hobble into the darkness, bent on endurance and malediction, and realised that nothing in this field of vision would have altered in five hundred years. The paving slabs, the building stones, the January gloom, the human figure wrapped in dark wool and clutching a wooden stick: I was gazing into the past. Venice is time travel.
The fog hushed what was already a quiet city further; you could hear the city's fearless sparrows squabble with each other in the vaporetto shelters. Eventually a lumbering boat would loom, groaningly reverse and thump the wharf posts. There would be an exchange of shuffling, muffled passengers, and it would wallow off again. The only trace the great Greek ferries left now was a dull moan; fog had swaddled up their improbable bulk as they inched across the basin and down the Giudecca towards the Maritime Station. Boatmen still sing in Venice, since there's a chance the song will be heard. I was there the week the gondoliers are meant to migrate to Cuba, but there were enough of them to idle chilled Japanese around the tiny rivers; once or twice, an aria preceded the appearance of the six-toothed ferro, sliding like a submerged pikeman round a corner. A gondola is black and laquered, like a grand piano; the passengers sat on little thrones beneath thick, embroidered blankets, mute with the strangeness of it all.
The top of the Campanile in San Marco had disappeared into the fog, and at night the floodlights which were meant to strafe it and play on the arched façade of the basilica floundered lamely in the pewter vapour. On Saturday morning - was it morning? -- I seemed to be almost alone in the Piazza, the symmetries of the Procuratie receding austerely about me on each side. Then the bells began. The fog didn't snuff the sound so much as trap it at ground level. Bell strike melted into bell strike, amplified by the stone slabs under my feet; I began to feel the resonance in my bones, my liver, my heart. Any louder, I thought, and internal bleeding might begin. Perhaps I would be the first tourist ever to be murdered by the bells of San Marco. I hurried into Florian's, where not only could I chose my table, but also sit, if I wished, in an entirely empty room. A white-coated waiter brought me chocolate as thick as tree resin. I ate it rather than drank it, revelling in its bittersweet luxury, looking out at the January misery of the pigeon-food salesmen. Wagner's Siegfried Idyll spilled from the café speakers.
No one, of course, ever asks 'Should I go to Venice?'; the question is always 'When?' The time of fogs has a lot to recommend it. The entire Lombardy plain spends much of winter rendered mysterious by la nebbia, the fog, so any out-of-season visit may coincide with the descent of the celestial blanket. It is, admittedly, tedious for air travellers. The Alps, as I arrived on a January afternoon, were a masterpiece in rose and white; but fog clutching the reed beds around Marco Polo closed the airport shortly before we were to touch down. An attempt to land in Milan was defeated by industrial action; we were sent dispatched to Genoa. The five-hour bus journey was the reason I arrived in the city of footsteps and voices at 2am. But fear not: vaporetto number 1 plies the Grand Canal all night, so no Venice address will be more than fifteen minutes' walk away. To see the masonry of the Rialto Bridge, achingly familiar yet entirely new, take ghost form as I rounded the Canal's tightest curve at the very dead of night was an unexpected privilege in my travelling life.
Unless your stay is very short, too, the fog will eventually lift. The noise and horizons will return; you will see that Venice has gasworks and pylons and pollution. The insidious damp cold will ebb a little, as will the taste of the past. The bells will no longer threaten to break your frame, and you will see that you are not alone with your maps and your guidebook; you will realise, indeed, that Venice has no such thing as out-of-season. The rewards of a sunlit Venice have been amply conveyed elsewhere, and never more dazzlingly than by Canaletto himelf. As you watch the barges and lighters swarm across the basin, skipping between the serenity of San Giorgio and the sensuality of La Salute as they deliver the post and the beer and lug the vegetables of Catania and Umbria up to the Rialto, you'll find the busy pretty intricacy of the scene has barely changed, only the means of propulsion. Even fogless, there is no better place for those with an antipathy to the modern than Venice.