I did not follow them, but instead took my morning coffee in one of the bars on the Riva,

reading the Gazzettino, making notes for a treatise on King Ludwig in Venice, and leafing
through Grillparzers Italian Diary, written in 1819. I had bought it in Vienna, because
when I am travelling I often feel as Grillparzer did on his journeys. Nothing pleases me,
any more than it did him; the sights I find infinitely disappointing, one and all; and I
sometimes think that I would have done far better to stay at home with my maps and
timetables. Grillparzer paid even the Doges Palace no more than a distinctly grudging
respect. Despite its delicately crafted arcades and turrets, he wrote, the Doges palace was
inelegant and reminded him of a crocodile. What put this comparison into his head he
did not know. The resolutions passed here by the Coucil of State must surely be mysterious,
immutable and harsh, he observed, calling the palace an enigma in stone. The nature of
that enigma was apparently dread, and for as long as he was in Venice Grillparzer could not
shake off a sense of the uncanny. Trained in the law himself, he dwelt in that palace where
the legal authorities resided and in the inmost cavern of which, as he put it, the Invisible
Principle brooded. And those who had faded away, the persecutors and the persecuted, the
murderers and the victims, rose up before him with their heads enshrouded. Shivers of
fever beset the poor hypersensitive man. (pp. 53-54)

Reading of Casanova

() For my part, Casanovas attempt to plumb the unknown by means of a seemingly

random operation of words and numbers later caused me to leaf back through my own diary
for that year, whereupon I discovered to my amazement, and indeed to my considerable
alarm, that the day in 1980 on which I was reading Grillparzers journal in a bar on the
Riva degli Schiavoni between the Danieli and Santa Maria della Visitazione, in other words
near the Doges Palace, was the very last day of October, and thus the anniversary of
the day (or rather, night) on which Casanova, with the words E quindi uscimmo a
rimirar le stelle on his lips, broke out of the lead-plated crocodile. Later that evening I
returned to the bar on the Riva and fell into conversation with a Venetian by the name of
Malachio, who had studied astrophysics at Cambridge and, as shortly transpired, saw
everything from a great distance, not only the stars. () The fires never go out. The Stucky
Flour mill entered our line of vision, built in the nineteenth century from millions of bricks,
its blind windows staring across the Giudecca to the Stazione Marittima. The structure is
so enormous that the Doges Palace would fit into it many times over, which leaves one
wondering if it was really only grain that was milled in there. As we were passing by
the faade, looming above us in the dark, the moon came from behind the clouds and struck
a gleam from the golden mosaic under the left gable, which shows the female figure of a
reaper holding a sheaf of wheat, a most disconcerting image in this landscape of water and
stone. (pp. 62-63)