For centuries, Venice has captivated the hordes of visitors to its shores, yet it manages never to lose its beauty or mystery. Polly Devlin talks about one of the great loves of her life, and why it’s the last place she’d like to see ...

The last place on Earth. It’s funny how the phrase has two meanings. It’s the last place on earth I ever want to see again, you say crossly say after you’ve spent hours sitting in a traffic jam outside Portlaoise and then find there’s nowhere to eat anywhere in the town. I slander Portlaoise since my actual last place on earth would be the Moy (on the border of Armagh and Tyrone) on a wet day in July, a place where the police were so bigoted that they got me out of my car and did me over for frowning at an Orange march whose followers had closed the place to traffic as if they owned the town. Which in a way they did. They said they didn’t like the look on my face and I wanted to say well you should look at your own, hard as the hobs of hell, tiny eyes in a sea of flesh – but was too frightened to lisp a word.

And then there’s the last place on earth you would visit if you knew you could only go somewhere for the first or last time before you got on that long flight into the blue yonder. I’ve never visited Shanghai and I would love to, for the bustle and the strangeness, and I’d dearly love to see a last glimpse of the Connemara hills on a soft day as I went towards Ben Bulben. But the place to which I would go to say goodbye to this earth’s beauty would be Venice. And the reason is, that like reading great poetry, one stands amazed at what miraculous transcendental beauty certain human beings can create with the tools at their command. Words or bricks and bits of wood and paint and stones, tools that we all have and do little with, which makes their achievement seem the more extraordinary.

First you must arrive by air. I know, I know – think green – but remember this is your last time, or your first, and so you must arrive in Venice by the lagoon and see her lying there, as Ruskin said, “protected only by her loveliness”.

All of you who know Venice know that – wait for this analogy, you’re going to love it – know that it is like childbirth: if you have not experienced it or witnessed it, you can’t imagine its reality no matter how much you’ve read and thought about it. There is however no pain involved here, quite the opposite, but what emerges at the end is every single time a fresh miracle.

Some people will tell you that Venice is so crowded with tourists that it is unbearable, that it has at last lost its magic under the influx of visitors and cruise ships. Venice absorbs them in every sense. The point of St Mark’s Square is that it is built for crowds. All you have to do is to move sideways off the main tourist channels and you find silence and dreaminess. Others say it is so peopled with imaginings and expectations and longings that nothing comes untrammelled, that it has been too vitiated by the long toll of stares over the centuries. Not true. Venice reveals herself seductively every time, as though it were her first time, to the paying visitor; she’s a very clever courtesan indeed is the old girl. So though I know everyone thinks that Venice belongs to him or her, of course it belongs to me.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW.