One rainy afternoon, I bought a German classic translated into English in a Venetian bookshop.

First, as was my wont in Venice, I got completely lost trying to find the place. Little lanes enticed me away from our route, (as did a pair of earrings and a hand bag. I was weak.) At one point we re-entered a courtyard we'd left fifteen minutes earlier, only from the other side. The cafe on the corner seemed a good place to sit and re-orientate ourselves over a drink.

A we set off again to find the Acqua Alta Bookshop, the rain which had been threatening all day finally fell. A light rain which merely brought a soft colour to the streets, as if I had walked into a Canaletto painting.

We were in Castello area of Venice, which basically lies behind San Marco and stretches to the Arsenal at the end of the city. On the corner of the Calle Lunga Santa Maria Formosa, I was greeting by the most stunning display of wisteria. A cat sat beneath it, sheltering from the rain. The street is small cul-de-sac, and at the end an unassuming door beckoned.

And so I had found the Libreria Acqua Alta, the bookshop of high tides. To say books are everywhere is an understatement. Those that aren’t on shelves rest in piles, piled on top of other piles. Other books rest in bath tubs and canoes. A full sized gondola overflowing with books fills the main room of the shop. There seems little order to their arrangement, other than roughly by language.

(My apologies for the dearth of photos. A rainy day in Venice, small rooms - the place was packed, and photos difficult.)

And so I'd found my natural environment, a place filled with books where I wandered through rooms which wound one into the other, each packed with books.  Each room seemed to have its own cat which watched me. The place regularly floods (hence the bath tubs) and books ruined by rising waters have been turned into a book staircase, or else seats where you can sit and read their healthier cousins. A small balcony opens onto a canal, where a gondola waits if you feel like sitting and resting tired feet.

And so I bought, amongst other finds, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Afterwards, we wandered back towards out hotel in a gentle rain, as the canals slowly started to rise.

The Literary Traveller

Written in 1912 by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice is novella filled with allegory, classical references and the exploration of the recent works by Sigmund Freud.

The story tells of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but socially isolated author who travels to Venice to find inspiration. An ascetic intellectual, Aschenbach quickly succumbs to the vitality and sensuality of Venice, from the landscape itself to the people he meets - or simple watches from afar.

As the city succumbs to a cholera plague, Aschenbach struggles to free himself of bourgeois restrictions and social norms as he becomes increasingly obsessed with a beautiful youth.

Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His works are filled with the psychological struggles of the intellectual and the artist. He is one of the best known writers of the German literary movement Exilliteratur, who fled Germany and wrote in exile due to their opposition to the Nazi regime.

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