Antipasti, primi… turkey

Still bearing a teenage grudge against Harry’s Bar for not serving me when I was cuter and poorer, the adult me sees Venice differently. To most, it’s famous for one thing – as Robert Benchley wrote in a telegram to David Niven in the 1930s: “Streets flooded. Please advise”. But there are other visual aspects to it.

The serious yet amusing book Venice, The Tourist Maze introduced me to Venice as the pilgrim hub, offering sights such as, “…diverse heads of Saints, encased in hold, a small ampulla, or glass with the Saviour’s blood, a great morsel of the real cross, one of the nails…a finger of Mary Magdalene, numerous other things, which I cannot remember.”

Pilgrims still gather here – 30 million every year – only of a different sort. Not only is the city’s film festival, founded in 1932, superior to the tacky poodle of Cannes and worthy Berlin, Venetians clearly love film. And, as the setting for over 400 of them, even if Venice breaks up and sinks, it will live on – in Visconti’s lush melodrama Senso (1954), sensual Brideshead Revisited or that surefit hit of 2010, The Tourist (2010). Written by The Usual Suspect’s Christopher McQuarrie and Downtown Abbey’s Julian Fellowes initially for Tom Cruise, it was re-worked into a double-whammy, hammy glam comedy for Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp by Oscar-winning director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Costing about $100m, it earned a pittance at the American box office. (To be fair, The Tourist has earned $270m worldwide so, with marketing costs, it’s almost breaking even.) When two of the world’s most beautiful stars look like the lesser work of Madame Tussauds, I felt sorry for the city, but I needn’t have.

“It’s a shame The Tourist wasn’t a good film,” say one Venetian to me, when I mention it. “They filmed in the market and they were charged thousands of Euros because the shops said they’d lose business on the first day of the week. The market is never open on Monday anyway, so pffft.” He gestures. Cinema needs Venice, not vice versa.

I could do this on the hoof, getting lost, sweating and swearing with a guidebook in my hand. However, with a few hundred notes to blow, I want one of those gleaming wooden boats to take me around the city

Most movies these days will opt for cheaper and easier special effects but there is no substitute for the real thing – and that’s why I find Venice “location porn”. Visually compact with a variety of tones, every turn is cinematic, with narrow lanes squeezed by tiny homes leaning beyond vertical, palatial mansions, lush lagoons and sweeping canal turns. It is ridiculously iconic: one background plate (a shot used instead of filming at the actual location) brings the audience immediately to the City of Dreams. If I woke up with amnesia in Venice, I may not know who I was, but I’d know where I was.

This is why I want to find my personal cinematic Venice. I could do this on the hoof, getting lost, sweating and swearing with a guidebook in my hand. However, with a few hundred notes to blow, I want one of those gleaming wooden boats to take me around the city. I want to look swanlike and wear completely non-sensible, uncomfortable shoes, just like Angelina did in The Tourist. In this, Venice as a Movie Dream is perfect. A 4-6 hour tour to various locations around the city, it starts at the Hotel Cipriani, the celebrity magnet of Venice, and goes on to show me Venice as it was meant to be seen – from the waterline.

Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now

The tour is flexible, naturally, but it covers more than I thought – and, like a proper tour, I get to see the city better than almost anyone else. The hardest part is leaving my water taxi to reach San Marco Square. The most famous part of Venice has seen its share of filmmakers, including Orson Welles shooting Othello (1952) and that silly gondola scene in James Bond’s Moonraker (1979). In the same square, Café Florian, opened in 1720, provided a romantic backdrop for Katharine Hepburn in David Lean’s Summertime (1955). Of course, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and Matt Damon shot there for The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) as well as the late Heath Ledger in Casanova (2005). Before you suspect any kind of Death in Venice theme, be assured there isn’t one. Not here, anyway.

A list of all the stops is meaningless – for a newcomer, it’s a bunch of sounds, for old timers, a raft of misty watercolour memories. Maybe it’s the rube in me that finds everything terribly exciting when seen from an elegant water taxi. Show me a bit of rock or glimpse of a doorway, and I don’t care whether I’ve seen the film or not. The back area of Teatro La Fenice, with its bridge dedicated to Maria Callas, is where Alberto Sordi appeared as a fake gondolier in Venice, The Moon and You (1958). I haven’t seen the film – and the bridge itself looks plain and utilitarian – but it’s exciting all the same. I’m suddenly part of a world where beauty and history is quotidian. Yes, you’re really here, in Venice. You’re in the flow of history.

Venetian setting is necessary for The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Wings of a Dove (1997) and Visconti’s Death In Venice (1971), all relief on the sinister glamour of a place famous for masked festivals, courtesans, gambling and, erm, other unspoken things. But Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade (1989)?

Walter Bolzonella at the Hotel Cipriani, mixing up bellinis

Of all the filmic excuses to visit Venice, one of the best is 1973’s Don’t Look Now. Starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, Nicholas Roeg’s groundbreaking thriller is the emotional opposite of The Tourist. Almost identical to the short story – I suggest rereading it during your visit – Roeg’s Venice confounds with twisty streets and endless canals. Shot through overcast skies and offseason fog, the city looks queasy and uneasy. This is the cowering, lethal Venice that shapeshifts in the corner of your eye. Winter Venice is not the same sweltering beast of summer.

Don’t Look Now’s real locations are not easy to find. I cross the lagoon from The Cipriani, up a quiet canal where the water taxi barely fits beneath a bridge. The underside is so low, the boatman laughs. There, on a knuckle of the canal, naked and innocent, is the 12^th century church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli. (According to the legend, Saint Nicholas saved three girls from prostitution. Who knew?) Restoring the church is the reason the Baxters (Sutherland and Christie) came to Venice in the first place. Although in all respects an ordinary Venetian Catholic church, the shadowy interior of “Saint Nicholas of the Beggars” has a damp coolness that sends a shiver up my spine. Even in summer, it’s a sort of Don’t Look Now for real.

The seven-minute open boat ride to the tip of the Giudecca freshens me up and reminds me that it is just a story, just a movie. At the Hotel Cipriani, a white peach bellini or four await, made by the legendary head barman, Walter Bolzonella. He’s excellent at chatting and remembers when the drink’s red tinge came from rosy peach skin not raspberry. Once you’ve seen Don’t Look Now, the colour red is never quite the same, especially in Venice. C

The Leading Hotels of the World (00800 2888 8882) arranges stays at Hotel Cipriani, including Venice as a Movie Dream guided tours of the city

Karen Krizanovich is a writer, radio and TV broadcaster and movie script editor. She is also a trained voice-over artist, specialising in chocolate voices, robot/Vulcan, American regional accents and anything throaty