The Tao proceedeth by its own nature, doing nothing;
therefore there is no doing which it comprehendeth not.
If kings and princes were to govern in this manner,
all things would operate aright by their own motion.

Lao-Tzu: Tao Te Ching[1]

 Every repeated visit to Venice would but deepen my sense of its unreality. The city’s silhouette in the lagoon mist together with trans-ocean cruisers, would flicker like a mirage, outside time and space. The next impression, having finally entered the city itself, would alternate between melancholy and disappearance, so aptly captured in Visconti’s adaptation of the book by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, and decadence and perversion, portrayed by Fellini in his film Casanova.