[1] Louis Begley's essay is on the city's place within world literature and discusses works of Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann that are set in Venice.

The rush of pleasure is just as intense when we first see from the water taxi we boarded at the airport the outline of the city glimmering in the morning haze; we still find that the way we live in Venice goes well with our work.

Our painter son who has lived in Rome for many years, and whose knowledge of Venetian calli and rii and sottoporteghi, and of the contents of the sacristies of out-of-the-way churches, is almost as surprising as my wife's, has continued to spend harmonious days with us, organized around lunches and dinners, which we eat late to safeguard the working hours during which we are not to be disturbed.

It was also in the early 1950s, although I cannot pinpoint the year, that I began to read Henry James, at first probably some of the stories and perhaps The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square, and later, but while I was still at college, the longer works.

I have a life-long unshakeable habit of peering at people, events and places through works of fiction I admire, as though they were so many different pairs of glasses, each of which in its own way adjusts my vision.