In my new novel The Echoes of Love, my heroine, Venetia, is an architect by trade who specialises in the restoration of historical mosaics. My choice of profession for my protagonist was quite deliberate. First, I wanted Venetia to be intelligent, creative, hardworking and determined, as of course all students of architecture must be in order to achieve their degree. In addition, I wanted Venetia to be tied closely to her home, Venice, in which architecture and the preservation of beautiful historical artistry is so important.

When I first visited Venice, nothing could have prevented me from falling in love with the city for its scenery, its people and its culture. As Fran Lebowitz wrote: If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you’ve imagined. Venice is – Venice is better.

Venice has long served as inspiration for writers; Lord Byron, for example, called it ‘The greenest island of my imagination’. But the inspiration is unusual in that it does not originate purely from looking, but from truly engaging. Think of those great Romantic poets like Wordsworth who wrote nature poetry, or of Leconte de Lisle, one of my favourite French poets, who described creatures in the wild. They saw, they were inspired and they wrote. But Venice – Venice is a city that demands you experience, you understand, you learn. You go on a gondola. You take a tour of a beautiful old church. You go to museums and art galleries. You attend a concert.

Too many people think of Venice simply as a tourist destination (and a busy one at that), a place to go for a weekend away. But that’s simply not doing this city justice. There is a good reason why so much art and literature and music and theatre and architecture and innovation originated in Venice, and a good reason why so many creatives, in recent years and back through history, have come to the city to stay and to study. Venice opens the mind. No wonder Robert Browning described Italy in general as ‘his university’.

One UK university has taken Browning’s quote so much to heart that it now has a permanent Italian base in the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava. A history professor at the University of Warwick first brought a group of students to spend a term in Venice back in 1967. The venture was so successful that today Warwick offers ‘the Venice term’ to students of Renaissance Studies. The university has produced a collection of essays celebrating Warwick in Venice, offering some fascinating insights into the city’s culture, with some content of special interest to writers. The book is available free as an ebook here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/culture/goliardia/uw_venicebook_11.pdf. Well worth a read!