Venice, a state of mind. The scintillating, kaleidoscopic, shifting colors of that aqueous realm remain alive inside me long after I depart the city. While there, the sensory overload leaves me happily exhausted at the end of day, reeling with images of the man peeling artichokes at fifty miles an hour in the Rialto market, stalls mounded with lurid fish, clothes waving on lines strung across canals, squadrons of pigeons, the flashing oars of the gondoliers, the lure of luxury shops, the shadowy windows of the ombra (shadow) bars, tourists gorging into San Marco, narrow streets leading me farther into a labyrinth, even the sparrows pecking at my bread basket at a waterside restaurant. I let myself wander all day, following a glimpse of a facade, a snatch of violin music, a child kicking a ball, and a cascade of blue plumbago hanging over a distant garden wall. I’m almost thoughtless in Venezia (after you’re there, it’s Venice no longer), reverting to a primitive creature who takes on the color and temperature of where I sit, sipping a spritzer in an ocher, apricot, and stone piazza.

Mysterious. Venezia feels like the maze of my psyche. I follow the squares, turns, bridges, canals, looking for signs, omens. Eventually the city, I’m certain, will lead to some secret X I’ve sought all my life.

Later and far away from Venezia, the city floating through memory is silent. It belongs only to me, the traveler. I stand again in Palladio’s Il Redentore, watching that white-as-icicles light fall through the lofty coved windows. Was the cold light a part of his architectural plan? In a city patched from an abbondanza of tints and hues, did he think: You shall be immersed in white air? I step outside and the Grand Canal—suddenly still—has darkened under a cloud to shimmering blue, like the supple Venetian velvet cape I once glimpsed on a woman stepping off a yacht in the rain. (If I ever saw another, I’d mortgage my house to buy it.) But maybe it’s enough, just to remember an expanse of water faceted with light. Venezia, the literal gate to the earliest home, the watery subconscious. Under an arched bridge, the narrow canal—what is that green? Liquid malachite? The eyes of the first boy I loved…Yes, and when the sun hits, the color shifts to the green of a parrot’s wing. At lunch, nearby motor launches break up the surface, cutting the reflections into cubist angles of blue, yellow, red, and white, churning and reforming.

At night, the reflections turn silver and gold; long wands of starry shapes easily mesmerize me. Always in memory, the moon is full. Nowhere is the moon as powerful, enormous, so…well, heavenly. Because it floats, the city floats, too, becomes a mirage of a mirage. The moon could be chipped from travertine by an artist. Why not? Haven’t humans created this unlikely phantasm of a city? Couldn’t they just as easily hang a moon over it?

On the brink of sleep, I sense the light in the Carpaccio painting at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, The Dream of Saint Ursula. She is sleeping with her little dog at her bedside. At the door, the angel has just arrived, holding the palm of her martyrdom. He steps into the room in a triangle of sunlight. All these years, that golden light has fallen into the calm bedroom where she is dreaming. The memory of a place is like that. You are the dreamer. You are the room. You open the door over and over.