‘Why Venice’ by David Hewson

19th July 2023

People always talk about location when it comes to books. To be honest I don’t really see things that way. Locations are pictures, postcards, static images. Books, for me, exist inside something far richer… worlds, whether they’re the fantasy ones of Harry Potter or the ancient Rome of Robert Graves. Worlds have multiple dimensions – you can see them, hear them, feel them, taste them, sense the way their occupants differ from the rest of us, detect how they change from season to season.

For the last few books, Venice has been my world. The Garden of Angels was mostly set in the desperate period of Nazi occupation during World War Two. The Medici Murders, written in lockdown, I wanted to be a bit lighter, more of an entertainment. It introduces a very different kind of protagonist, Arnold Clover, a retired archivist who seems to have a knack for landing himself in sticky situations.

In Arnold’s second outing, The Borgia Portrait, he finds himself corralled to help out an Englishwoman, Lizzie Hawker, who’s inherited a spooky, abandoned palazzo on the Grand Canal. Lizzie lost her father, a dodgy music promoter, recently, and her Italian mother who once owned the palazzo is presumed to have committed suicide when Lizzie was a child. But as the old place is opened up a grim discovery is unearthed in a hidden crypt in the garden. And suddenly Lizzie, with Arnold by her side, finds herself facing a pressing dilemma. Somewhere in Venice there’s a legendary erotic portrait of the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, one that, by rights, should belong to her, one that could solve her personal and financial problems. Two things stand in her way – the portrait is hidden behind a very cryptic riddle. And a rich Venetian, Enzo Canale, who thinks both painting and palazzo belong to him.

There’s always more than one story in a book, at least there is for me. The top level one is Lizzie Hawker’s race to find the painting, and with it some kind of security and peace. Beneath that though I wanted to attempt something else, to set a riddle in which the clues and the answers lie within Venice itself. It’s such an extraordinary city, more so than most people appreciate. So much of the modern world – music, art, government procedures, even printing and publishing – can be traced back to the genius of men and women who lived and worked there over the centuries.

I wanted The Borgia Portrait to acknowledge this. That means Lizzie and Arnold’s quest will take in episodes and characters from its long, and colourful history. The riddles themselves are couched within a fictional extract from Casanova’s secret diary. They lead to encounters with some of the many famous and infamous figures who’ve passed through over the years… Lord Byron, the artist Modigliani, Pietro Bembo the churchman lover of Lucrezia Borgia, and a strange Englishman, half genius half fraud, Frederick Rolfe, onetime author who died destitute there after ripping off as many visiting rich tourists as he could find. And a real-life lover of Venice I had the privilege to meet once, John Julius Norwich, whose seminal work on the city provides an essential pointer for Arnold and Lizzie when they need it.

Each clue in Lizzie and Arnold’s riddle is to do with a real-life place, all of them I’m proud to say well-hidden from the normal tourist routes. As part of their search they’ll uncover everything from an out-of-the-way sotoportego, a passageway between buildings that was thought to protect against plague, to the mummified corpse known as ‘the Rialto dwarf’, the cryptic burial place of monks within a half-forgotten church, a spy carved from wood and the decidedly spooky story of Saint Lucia and her missing eyes.

It was enormous fun putting all this together over a busy year exploring aspects of Venice I’d never found before, even though I’ve been visiting the city for nearly thirty years now. It made me realise this is a city you can never truly know, a world that’s boundless, forever prompting speculation and ideas. Oh, and one other decision I made with this book too: no maps. If you want to find the places in Lizzie and Arnold’s story they’re there, and with enough clues in the book to find them. This isn’t a tourist guide. It’s an invitation to explore the hidden sides of one of the most remarkable cities on earth, through serendipity, the best way to approach Venice there is

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