In Invisible Cities, the beautiful series of imaginary tales by the late Italian novelist Italo Calvino, the Kublai Khan at one point reproves Marco Polo for not once mentioning Venice among all the fantastic cities he has described to the emperor. “Every time I describe a city,” replies Marco Polo, “I am saying something about Venice.”

This passage stuck in my mind as the express train from Milan hurried me toward Marco Polo’s native city. If there exists such a thing as the collective unconscious, then Venice is our frame of reference for the urban fantastic, a place that wavers like Calvino’s invisible cities between the real and the imaginary and that, because it indeed belongs to our world, is all the more extraordinary.

As you approach the city over the bridge from the Italian mainland, you leave behind terra firma and, with it, earthbound notions of how to see and experience a city. Venice is not solely the spill of churches and palazzi on either side of the Grand Canal, but rather a city of islands, 118 in all, some of which are little more than the weedy, crocodilian humps you see in the Lagoon of Venice. And yet these mud flats provided haven for the people who fled here (without benefit of a bridge) from Huns, Visigoths, and other marauders in the fifth century. And those refugees gave birth to a culture that ripened into a thousand years of greatness.

As you near the end of the bridge, you see at first only the back side of the city itself. But in the time it takes to walk through the train station, you begin to hear sounds peculiarly Venetian—the low rumble of boat motors, a humid incubation of voices, water lapping insistently against wood and stone. And then Venice confers her greatest gift: No matter how many times you’ve been here, it always seems, in that first glimpse, like the first time.

If you are smart, you will immediately start a tour down the Grand Canal by hopping on a vaporetto (water bus) or gondola or water taxi. If you are lucky, it will be during those few hours before sunset when the light shines most kindly on the venerable facades that line this liquid boulevard. If you are particularly observant, you might even notice that neither the light nor the colors are quite Italian, not like the tawny earth tones of Florence or Rome.

The canal is a murky green, the palazzi a mix of faded, grimy sherbets—watermarked mint and sun-blanched apricot and deep over-ripe peach. Sunlight shatters into spangles on the water, gondolas knife back and forth, the Rialto Bridge looms overhead, and then, beyond one final curve, the Palladian church of Santa Maria della Salute and the campanile (bell tower) of San Marco come into view.

In this brief trip you will have had the opportunity to learn two obvious but essential truths about Venice. The city is first and foremost a riotous construct for the eye. It has often been noted that Venetians are enamored of the surface of things, and it is hardly coincidence that sometimes the entire city seems a preposterous stage set, a succession of opulent false fronts. True, there are pleasures aplenty to enjoy indoors, but Venice turns her best profile outward, particularly to the water.

The second essential truth about Venice is that it has little in common with the Italy we know today. Venice invented its own brand of leadership in the person of the doge, established its own form of government (republic), and cultivated a genius for trade, moneymaking, and diplomacy that allowed it not only to become one of history’s more glorious city-states, but also to maintain its lofty status for centuries in a dangerous Europe.

An American writer, in the interest of humor, recently dismissed Venice as “a three-day burg.” And it is possible to roar through Venice’s major attractions in three days; many visitors do. But I subscribe to the theory of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spent the first two days of a 1786 visit simply wandering about without a map, dutifully flinging himself “in and out of the labyrinth.”

The charm of the city, as Goethe wisely intuited, is to stumble in a leisurely fashion upon its delights, or round a corner and suddenly see the arched Rialto Bridge, lined along both edges with roofed-over shops, constantly thronged, a bustling, everyday monument to the rivo alto (high bank) where many Venetians first settled. Or you could back through some unpromising, dark portico into Piazza San Marco, the magnificent open square where the eye can flit among many diverse and pleasing forms—the soaring campanile, the toylike 15th-century clock tower, the long arcades of the procuratie (government buildings of the republic), the vast open pavement.

Piazza San Marco is Venice’s grand salon—expansive, familiar, picturesque, pigeonesque. It is anchored at its eastern extreme by the Basilica di San Marco, which is not only the spiritual seat of Venice’s patron saint but also one of the most glittering monuments of Christendom.

In the piazza the sublime and absurd collide, and by taking a coffee or an apertivo at Florian, Quadri, or another of the stylish cafés that spill out from under the arcades, you can witness the spectacle firsthand. Where ducal processions once delighted the crowds, you might now see two fellows booting a soccer ball back and forth in the midst of the evening passeggiata, or stroll. Or you might suffer to hear one of the café orchestras playing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Enthroned in a café chair, ensconced in the perfect piazza, who could possibly long for another city?

The basilica, with its lead-colored, soap-bubble domes and shimmering lunettes, presents all the architectural hubbub of some Oriental bazaar, its tents frozen in permanent billow. The analogy is not entirely inappropriate, for it has become the main repository of Venice’s plunder from the Byzantine Empire, dating from A.D. 828, when Venetian merchants supposedly pilfered, among other riches, the bones of St. Mark and transported them here from Alexandria.

Until 1807 the basilica served as a chapel for the doges. Entire books have been devoted to its sumptuous ornamentation, especially the mosaics that span centuries of craftsmanship. There is the jewel-encrusted Pala d’Oro, a large gold screen with exquisite enamel panels, and there is a trove of silver and gold booty, captured in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

But it struck me that the supreme opulence of the basilica lies in its play of line, a theme that holds true for Venice as a whole. Inside the building my eye followed a weave of intersecting lines, from exquisite floor mosaics up pedestals and massive piers, along slender columns, through arches and porches, to the cupolas and windows. There a soft morning light, braised golden by the surrounding tiles, rained back down to the floor.

Ongoing restoration has at least temporarily obscured San Marco’s facade, and the four horses mounted on the terrace above the entrance are in fact copies of the famous bronze originals, which are stabled in the basilica’s upstairs museum, safe from pollution, pigeon droppings, and other disparagements of man and nature. Inside, in addition to being able to study the mosaics at close range, you can step out onto the terrace for a lovely perspective onto the piazza, where the countless pigeons, like iron filings, shift with magnetic precision around people striding through the square.

Next door is the Doge’s Palace, seat of power during the heyday of the republic. The doge was a curiously Venetian invention, pleasing to the eye in his wardrobe of rich gowns and popular in his role as the personification of official pomp and ceremony, but denied any real power by Venice’s elaborate structure of governmental checks and balances. Indeed, it is amazing that the Venetians had any time left to govern after counting votes in the various countervailing bodies—including the 120-strong Senate, the powerful Council of Ten (which sometimes had more than double that number), the Signoria (6), and the 2,000-member Great Council.

As pink and cheery as the Gothic facade of the palace is, the rooms inside are dark and moody, fittingly so for all the spies, intriguers, demagogues, and ambassadors that slinked through them. Huge allegorical paintings by Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto decorate the walls. It is not difficult to imagine the tense votes and pademoniacal war debates that occurred here over the centuries.

If the Doge’s Palace leaves you bewildered about Venice’s past, the Civico Museo Correr, a shore walk away, offers historical orientation. Its collected relics—from a red “Good Friday” cape worn by the doge to martial trophies won in celebrated battles—tell of the life and times of the republic.

Getting to know Venice’s rich and varied personality requires that you go off the main thoroughfares, turn your back on San Marco or the Rialto, and strike out, like Goethe, for “the furthest edges of the inhabited area.” It is here, behind the more heavily trafficked canals, that the neighborhoods become warrens of humanity dissected by narrow alleys, punctuated by secluded piazzas, with flowerpots on windowsills and children playing in the streets.

The Cannaregio district, one of the six sestieri (neighborhoods) of the city, lies in the northern part of Venice. It is quiet, peaceful, and marked by broad, straight canals, lovely, out-of-the-way churches, and sights quintessentially Venetian: Two teenagers lug a 25-horsepower boat motor through the street. A little girl shyly retreats into a doorway next to the house where the painter Tintoretto lived 400 years ago.

One of the most interesting stops in Cannaregio is the Ghetto, to which Venetian Jews were confined beginning in 1516. The pejorative term that comes down to us is said to derive from the cannon foundries (ghetti) in the neighborhood. As many as 4,000 Jews lived in Venice’s Ghetto in the 17th century. Today, with changing residential patterns, only eight Jewish families remain in the neighborhood.

South and west of the Grand Canal lies the neighborhood known as Dorsoduro. Once peopled with artisans and maritime workers, the area now reflects quiet middle-class prosperity, along with a respectable kind of bohemianism. Its two most noteworthy attractions are the Accademia art museum and the 18th-century palace called Ca’Rezzonico.

The smell of sawdust and pitch along Dorsoduro’s Rio di San Trovaso gives a whiff of the vanishing past. The aroma leads to a picturesque squero—an open-air workshop where gondolas are made and repaired. Within this little group of buildings, red geraniums line second-floor railings, and the gondolas, their green bottoms facing up, project the melancholy aspect of beached whales—out of place, ungainly, decidedly unsleek.

But the yard is busy. Fires burn, pitch acridly perfumes the air, sanders raise a loud, grating noise, and the gondolas are restored. To watch is both fascinating and silly. It is, after all, the Venetian equivalent of starring in rapt wonder at an auto mechanic as he realigns a set of wheels in a garage.

Another morning found me taking coffee at an outdoor café along the quay named for the zattere, or rafts, that delivered wood. A typically florid inscription on the wall of the nearby Pensione Calcina took note of John Ruskin’s 1877 sojourn at the inn: “Every marble, every bronze, every canvas,” it read in part, “everything cried out to him that beauty is religion if human virtue summons it forth and the people’s reverence receives it.” With the aid of similarly ornate prose, you may discover the houses where Tchaikovksy composed, Lord Byron loved, and Wagner died.

The Castello district, to the east of San Marco, has campi (squares) like quiet backwoods glades. Here, in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, you are free to contemplate one of Venice’s most celebrated artistic phenomena—a wonderful series of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio, including his famous St. George, a charming St. Jerome, and an eerily timeless St. Augustine.

Castello is also home to one of the great underappreciated treasures of Venice, its massive Arsenale. Venice’s five-century domination of the eastern Mediterranean, both commercial and military, owed much to this huge shipyard, which in more prosperous times employed 16,000 workers and was said to turn out one ship a day.

Marble lions and a bust of Dante guard the impressive tower entrance. The Arsenale, alas, is even today a military zone closed to visitors. Seeking a deeper appreciation of Venice’s maritime history, you are stuck with the frustratingly inadequate Museo Storico Navale (Naval History Museum) nearby. But the Number 5 vaporetto does cut through part of the vast shipbuilding complex and affords an edifying peek at arched brick hangars used in medieval times for building boats.

Of all Venice’s monuments, none are more emblematic than the private residences—the great palazzi lining the Grand Canal—such as the Ca’ d’Oro, the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, and the Ca’ Pesaro. These are architectural gems in their own right, but perhaps more important, they flaunt a personal opulence and civic wealth that had begun to accumulate here even before Marco Polo thought about his journey to the Far East.

It is not a trivial point for visitors, because while the days of Venice’s economic suzerainty are long gone, the aloof airs that accompanied that wealth have not entirely dissipated. I got a hint of that fact one day over lunch in a trattoria in Castello. I started talking with a Milanese businessman at the adjoining table, and the attitude of Venetians toward their tourists came up for discussion. “They resent them,” he observed, stating what even Venetians themselves admit. “But it is the kind of resentment you have for the people you depend on.”

Indeed, where ships once brought Oriental silks and spices and rare jewels to boost the Venetian economy, now jumbo jets and trains disgorge the tourists who keep the economy afloat—but at a cost to local monuments and to local peace of mind. “We have six million visitors a year,” observed Franco Mancuso, a practicing architect and teacher in Venice. “Four and a half million of them arrive in the morning and leave in the evening.” Such tourism, he argues, is changing the city. “Old shops die out, and new, ‘false’ types of business come in to take their place,” he explained. “The Rialto market was once a vital, integral part of the community. Now it is changing. Where once there was a fish seller, now perhaps there is a shop selling trinkets.”

During the high season, between May and September, the daily wave of visitors often outnumbers the 85,000 residents of the city center, overwhelming public transportation and producing incredible pedestrian traffic tie-ups. Since no one loves Venice as much as the Venetians themselves do, this influx creates obvious tensions. Several years ago the city’s then-mayor went so far as to propose that visitors—who would be limited to a fixed number per day—should pay to get into the city, as if it were some vast theme park.

Given Venice’s historical taste for affluence and perhaps resentment at seeing her economy change from trading and brokering to servicing tourists, be forewarned that the Venetians assuage this pain by treating visitors with a certain diffidence and by charging top dollar for everything.

A quick survey from the Campanile of San Marco shows that the splendor of Venice is guarded by numerous modest, even humble, outlying islands that form part of this strange urban archipelago. For everyone curious about how these islands may have looked prior to population and empire, a pilgrimage to the island of Torcello is a pleasant obligation. Legend has it that Torcello was originally settled in the fifth century A.D., and its gorgeous cathedral began to rise in 639.

The island is small, flat, green, and wild—or so it seemed to me after the dense urban ostentation of Venice itself. Chickens scurry along fencerows; huge spiders, as dexterous and industrious as the famous lace makers of nearby Burano, spin a diaphanous scaffolding between the trees and appear to float in the air in the middle of their webs. The loveliest sight on Torcello, however, is the stark, pale cathedral, with its stunning 12th- and 13th-century mosaics depicting the Last Judgment.

Torcello is to my mind the most interesting of the lagunal islands, but others have their attractions. Burano charms visitors with the brash color schemes of its small houses—blues and oranges and pinks, characteristically trimmed in white. Murano, to the west, has supported since the 13th century a gifted community of glassblowers, though the lower ranks of this craft today produce such tossed-off abominations as frogs playing basketball and Pink Panthers wearing walkmans.

I am also partial to the Lido, the long, scrawny dune of an island that forms a breakwater between the lagoon and the Adriatic. For decades it was a smart European resort, its chief landmark the magnificently frivolous Grand Hotel Excelsior. The presence of cars here reminds you of their absence in Venice.

Giudecca lies just south of Venice proper. It is famed primarily for the Palladian church of the Redentore, focus of an exuberant local festival commemorating the end of a plague in 1577. On the third Sunday of July boats are lashed together to form a floating sidewalk leading from the Zattere waterfront to the steps of the church, crossing some 300 yards of the Guidecca Canal. Festivalgoers make a marvelous waterborne passeggiata to reach feasts and fireworks on the island. Along with the Regata Storica (Historic Regatta), held in September, and the recently revived pre-Lenten Carnevale, the Festa del Redentore is one of Venice’s most spectacular celebrations.

Perhaps Guidecca’s greatest virtue is its superb view of Venice. This was never more apparent to me than early one evening when a violent thunderstorm blew through the city. In some ways it seemed like nature’s exaggeration of the everyday sound-and-light show that is Venice. Instead of the grumble of boat engines, there was the rumble of thunder; instead of the puny flash of a tourist’s camera against the vast facade of the Doge’s Palace, there were great scrawls of lightning overhead. All of Venice’s trademark monuments—the dome of the Salute and the campanili of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, all her urban stalks and bulbs—were backlit by huge walls of light, as if to produce a silvery, rain-soaked silhouette for the enjoyment of those of us on Guidecca. Like the best pleasures of Venice, the sight was spectacular and short-lived—one more little retinal carpe diem.

The following morning I stood before Giorgione’s enigmatic masterpiece of a painting, “The Tempest.” After the relentlessly allegorical and heroic canvases that line the walls of Venice’s public buildings, you come to appreciate even more the contradictions at play in this psychologically rich landscape—a mother nursing her child, a soldier watching her, an approaching storm. A jewel of the Accademia gallery, it is Venetian painting at its mystical, theatrical best.

Eyestrain can lead you to take a radical stand on the issue of aesthetic sight-seeing in Venice, however. According to one popular guidebook, the visitor to Venice should pay his respects at 18 museums and galleries and 47 churches, and should pause before hundreds of masterpieces. Unless you are well schooled in Venetian painting or are predisposed to poke your nose into every ill-lit chancel and chapel, you will very quickly feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this obligation—“churched out,” as one fellow New Yorker described it. Venetian art is an acquired taste; quick serendipitous sips are the best way to sample it.

The Accademia, of course, houses the most comprehensive survey of Venetian art—no quick sip here. In one magnificent room, in one magnificent 360-degree revolution, you can take in Veronese’s “Christ in the House of Levi,” Titian’s “Pietà,” and Tintoretto’s “Transport of the Body of St. Mark.” Among its other treasures are the madonnas of Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio’s St. Ursula cycle, and the postcard-like views of Venice by Francesco Guardi and Canaletto.

One afternoon, with time to kill before an appointment, I ventured into the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, a beautiful austere Franciscan church, and there beheld Titian’s luminous “Assumption,” with its impassioned disciples and its Virgin robed in red and blue, ascending to heaven on a cloud. Next I visited the nearby Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where all the swirling drama and moody passion of Tintoretto find their greatest expression, especially in the magnificent “Crucifixion.”

On the other hand, several planned pilgrimages to the church of San Sebastiano, on the western periphery of Dorsoduro, were frustrated because the church was always closed. Finally, I got there just as services let out one Sunday and enjoyed a few moments alone with the works of Veronese (who is buried in the church.)

As respite from the weight and gravity of these classics I highly recommend a sojourn in the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which offers an outdoor sculpture garden, benches abutting the Grand Canal, and a lovely assemblage of modern art. After all the Sturm und Drang of a Tintoretto or the gold-tinged angels of Titian, it is a relief to linger on a Picasso or a Duchamp or to surrender to the mystery of Joseph Cornell’s little boxes.

And as respite from the library-like silence of galleries and churches, you can take advantage of Venice’s frequent and surprisingly inexpensive musical offerings—schedules are posted in the streets. I had the pleasure of attending a concert on the Ospedale della Pietà, a hospital-church where Antonio Vivaldi served as choirmaster and violin master for 40 years. The music, of course, was by Vivaldi.

On another occasion I heard a concert of chamber music at La Fenice, one of Europe’s loveliest opera houses. It is difficult, in retrospect, to say which was more satisfying, the music by Bach or the setting. La Fenice’s plush armchairs and gilt-edged tiers of boxes curling around the perimeter made me feel as if I were sitting inside a Fabergé egg.

The nice thing about extraordinary cities is that no matter how many people have been there before you, the truth of the place is large enough to be discovered again and again and again. If you have never seen window box geraniums reflected in a placid canal, trailed your fingers from a gondola, taken the improbable stage set of the Grand Canal by moonlight or the dark golden genius of Byzantium smoldering in a thousand mosaic tiles, never walked the Lido in a fog or heard your footsteps echo liquidly on some footpath long after midnight, never heard Vivaldi’s music in Vivaldi’s church or seen Palladian sunlight pour into a Palladian church, then it is all new and all beautiful, and we can each express in our own voice Venice’s enduring text of wonderment. In a world of sadnesses large and small, one of the saddest things imaginable to me is to spend a lifetime on this planet without ever having passed some part of it in Venice.

Stephen S. Hall’s book about genetic engineering, Invisible Frontiers, will be published this July. The information in this article was last verified in Spring 1987.