The Good Thief's Blog

More Venice Videos: The Rialto

Thought I'd post a couple more video clips from my research trips to Venice. These two clips date from late November 2009. The city was very quiet, but there was a good reason for that. It was absolutely freezing. Still, that was really helpful. The Good Thief's Guide to Venice is set in January, and since my plan was always to write about Venice outside of the main tourist seasons, it was probably my most useful trip in terms of trying to get a feel for what spending winter in Venice would be like.

This first clip is of me crossing the Rialto Bridge at night. I talk about writing a possible chase scene, and as it happens, a chase scene across the Rialto did find its way into the finished book - it features in Chapter 17, when Charlie and Victoria are pursued by the overweight, shabby guy in the camel-hair coat  and the fedora. In the book, the pursuit takes place in the day, but this clip was something I referred to when I was writing the section. At other times, it was really helpful to me when I was trying to remember what it was like to be walking through Venice at night, when most of the streets were abandoned. The clip was taken in the early evening, and even then, you can see that a popular area like the Rialto was not at all busy.

 

The clip below was filmed a few minutes later. As you can see, I was hunting for a suitable palazzo for Charlie to break into. At the time, I really thought I'd found it, but it turned out I was wrong. I ended up inventing a palazzo and locating it on the other side of the Rialto (and I'll post some clips related to that soon). There were a couple of reasons why this location wouldn't have worked in the book. One was that the palazzos on this stretch of the Grand Canal were set back from the water with a pavement running in front of them - which would have created serious problems for Charlie, given that he was destined to fall from a first floor balcony, and he'd have wound up hitting concrete instead of water... And the other reason? Well, that was something I only discovered the following day when I went and scouted around behind the buildings I was interested in. It turned out they were the location for a major police station, which I figured would be a challenge too far for my hapless thief...

 

Casing the Joint: Venice

I've mentioned before that a key part of writing the Good Thief novels involves me visiting the cities I write about (tough, I know). Generally, I go on three trips. One when I'm building up to start work on a novel, one when I'm some way through a first draft, and a final trip when I'm polishing the script.

It used to be that when I visited cities, I'd spend most of my time scribbling down notes. I'd try and describe as much as I could, without worrying too much about what I was writing. The idea was to try and sum up the sights and sounds in some pretty hasty language, and then tidy up my impressions when I got home to my desk. I did other things, too. I grabbed flyers and took photos. But it was still pretty labour intensive.

That all changed when the iPhone came along. With THE GOOD THIEF'S GUIDE TO VENICE, I was able to shoot quick films of anything that interested me. I could talk over the videos, with notes to myself or ideas or observations. In the end, I came back from my trips to Venice with a whole bunch of videos, and then I watched them over and over again at my leisure and simply wrote about what I'd seen. Much faster. Probably much more accurate, too. And so I thought it might be interesting to share some of the clips here.

First up, I've chosen these two clips, from when I was searching for a likely bookbinding business for Charlie to break into. This is the first burglary Charlie commits in the book, in a darkened alley, at night, when the streets of San Marco are mostly deserted. In order to be sure it was possible, I went out at night myself, and I found two likely locations.

The first one, though, had a problem...

Which is why I settled on this second location as the perfect place for the bookbinding business in the novel. It's where Charlie breaks in more than once, and where he comes face to face with Graziella, the glamorous female cat burglar who taunts him throughout the book.

I'll post more clips during the next few days. And I can only apologise for my terrible attempts at pronouncing Italian words...