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...
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