It is 3am, I cannot sleep. Damn it, I really can’t sleep – my conference finished two days ago and I’m on holiday, but my mind is racing. Only one thing for it: evade the thick crowds of honeymooning and iPhone-snapping humanity that ooze down these ancient streets in daytime, and go for a walk.
Down the stairs, a startled night porter looks twice and ushers me into the night. Theories turn visibly in his head: people trafficker? Mafia fixer? Art historian? But he seems nonplussed anyhow.
I turn left along the waterfront and walk, absorbing the quiet and the immensity of the stone edifices around me - moonlight rippling on the black lagoon waters. I'm grouchy at not sleeping but sense that Venice might deliver me a little reward.
3am - view from my hotel to the southern island of Giudecca.
Background: I got here by Air Canada via Toronto, crammed onto a 757-load of queue-forming men and women in baseball caps. The Venetians, it seems, got here in 500AD after tribes from Germany threatened the inland cities of Roman Italy, pushing some of them onto these small and defensible islands in a coastal lagoon.
Venice in daytime is a bit like Kings Cross Underground at rush hour. You walk with your arms out, braced in front of you, part of a human millipede of slowly moving and audibly cursing foot traffic. Honeymooners glower at other honeymooners for hogging the best photo spot. Selfie-sticks inflict vicious injuries.
Venice at 3am is very quiet, very dark, and pleasantly creepy. I walk up a pitch-black footpath along a canal, follow an alleyway, and emerge in front of a forbidding black door made of ingenious wrought iron with several vast gemstones lodged in it. Mental note: find out what the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is.
3.30am - Peggy Guggenheim museum. Her father Solomon controlled much of the world's mining wealth in 1900. She bought this residence on the Grand Canal and filled it with artists (to whom she was a patron and more) and their works: Max Ernst, Mondrian, Giacometti. She grudgingly left the collection to the Guggenheim Museum in New York ("my uncle's garage, that Frank Lloyd Wright thing on Fifth Avenue").
First time I came to Venice was in 2002 as a weekend stop between Hungary, where I shoveled cement for an English building contractor, and Nice, where I painted the railings outside one of his properties.
I took a Vaporetto to the youth hostel, ate very cheap and good pasta, and read The Merchant of Venice seated at an ancient plaza.
Trudging through darkness, I find a similar-looking square. Tonight it is ruled over by a ginger cat. His owners' clothing is strung up above us, looking like a Damien Hirst artwork, as a full moon glows eerily from between medieval turrets.
4am - main island of Cannaregio.
In daytime, getting from end-to-end is a particular challenge given there are only three bridges across the Grand Canal. Tonight, at 4.15am, it is gloriously quiet. Quiet enough for my senses to sharpen at the chugging of a barge on the canal below me: two guys moor the boat, unlock a green painted newspaper kiosk, and are back on the water within 20 seconds of lobbing three tightly bound bundles of papers and magazines inside.
My walk takes me on to the Rialto Bridge (favourite of Shakespeare and Canaletto) and a little alleyway between two palazzos on the Grand Canal. The moon is up. I stretch out in a gondola - a bit like a homeless guy except with the plausible deniability of having really great taste - and watch the daybreak.
4.30am - Grand Canal
Walking back, two brawny guys roll beer barrels from a barge into someone's cellar. Bells ring in a church tower. The sun gets really warm quickly: joggers (quite possibly Canadian) jog and shutters (probably AirBnBs inhabited by Canadians) twitch.
A cruise ship heaves into view. Saint Marks Square during the daytime is host not just to the Doge's palace but to about twelve billion tourists - enough to cause a stampede risk, and the reason Venice might plausibly have its UNESCO World Heritage status withdrawn.
It's still a beautiful place to visit, even if it's sinking and doomed. Especially if you're fortunate enough to visit as an insomniac.
5.00am - beer arrives for tonight's patrons
5.30am - sunrise
