I Fell in Love in Venice. He Wasn’t There.

On a city that feels like a memory, the peculiar romance of arriving alone, and a love affair I fully intend to revisit.

25th September 2026,

I have a theory that certain cities are not meant to be discovered. They are meant to be remembered.

Venice is one of them.

I first visited in 2024, which makes my attachment to the place somewhat unreasonable. I’ve been there exactly once, and yet I speak about it with the proprietary affection of someone who has spent several summers there, acquired a favorite florist, and developed an ongoing disagreement with a local over the correct way to prepare seafood.

None of these things happened.

I simply arrived, looked around, and experienced the rather disorienting sensation of missing somewhere I had never been.

There are cities that seduce you through spectacle. New York announces itself with the confidence of a person who has never considered the possibility of being disliked. Paris knows perfectly well that you have romanticized it and sees no reason to correct you. Rome is so magnificently indifferent to the passage of time that even its ruins appear to possess better posture than most modern buildings.

Venice, however, does something considerably more intimate.

It makes you nostalgic for a life you haven’t lived.

Perhaps it’s the water. Perhaps it’s the absence of cars, the narrow passages, the buildings whose facades seem to have absorbed several centuries of salt, sunlight, and human longing. Perhaps it’s the peculiar way the city seems to exist outside the ordinary machinery of time.

In Venice, even the inconveniences have a certain theatrical dignity. Getting lost becomes an activity rather than a failure of navigation. A wrong turn can deposit you in a courtyard so beautiful that you begin to suspect the city has been deliberately withholding it.

And the water is everywhere. Not simply as scenery, but as infrastructure, geography, atmosphere, and occasionally an unsolicited reminder that human civilization is a rather fragile arrangement.

I have always loved architecture, but Venice makes it almost impossible to separate architecture from emotion. Its buildings don’t merely occupy space; they seem to remember it. Every palazzo feels like the surviving witness to several generations of love affairs, family disputes, financial catastrophes, extravagant parties, and other distinctly human attempts to make life more interesting than it needs to be.

And perhaps that is why the city feels so romantic.

Not because romance is advertised at every turn, although Venice is certainly not above capitalizing on its own mythology. But because there is something inherently moving about a place that has been inhabited, loved, altered, and preserved for centuries.

Venice is beautiful in the way an old love letter is beautiful.

Not despite its age.

Because of it.

One of the most unexpected highlights of my visit was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

There is something wonderfully incongruous about encountering modern art in a city so thoroughly devoted to its own historical identity. Venice is all Gothic arches, Byzantine ornament, Renaissance grandeur, and the kind of architectural extravagance that suggests subtlety was never particularly fashionable among its wealthier residents.

And then, along the Grand Canal, there is the Guggenheim.

Housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished eighteenth-century palazzo that became Peggy Guggenheim’s home, the museum feels almost like a deliberate interruption in the city’s architectural conversation.

Inside, the collection moves through Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the wonderfully audacious experiments of artists who seemed determined to dismantle everything their predecessors had spent centuries perfecting.

Picasso, Pollock, Dalí, Kandinsky.

A collection of people who, in various ways, looked at the established rules of art and decided they had other plans.

I found the juxtaposition irresistible.

Outside, a city that has spent centuries preserving its identity. Inside, art that challenged the very idea that beauty, representation, and artistic expression needed to remain recognizable.

And somehow, neither diminished the other.

In fact, the contrast made both more interesting.

Perhaps that’s what I love about good architecture and good art. They don’t always need to agree with their surroundings. Sometimes the most compelling thing a space can do is introduce a different point of view.

The Guggenheim felt like that: a modern intellectual conversation taking place inside a city that had already witnessed several centuries of them.

And then there was the Aman.

I have a particular weakness for hotels that possess enough history to make the word hotel feel slightly insulting.

Aman Venice occupies Palazzo Papadopoli, a sixteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal, and walking through it feels less like entering a resort and more like being temporarily admitted into a rather extraordinary private residence.

Which, in a sense, it still is.

The Arrivabene family retains a residence within the palazzo, and the building’s historic interiors have been preserved alongside its contemporary transformation into a hotel.

The frescoes, the ornate ceilings, the monumental staircases, the paintings, the unapologetic grandeur of rooms designed in an era when architecture was expected to make a statement about one’s place in the world.

There is something almost surreal about occupying a space in which centuries of domestic life and contemporary luxury coexist.

I remember being particularly taken by the idea that a building could evolve without surrendering its biography.

It is a question that interests me professionally as much as personally. As someone who works in design, I find the relationship between preservation and adaptation endlessly fascinating. How much can you change a space before it becomes something else? At what point does restoration become reinvention? And how do you introduce modern life into a historic building without treating its past as an inconvenience?

The Aman seemed to understand that the answer was not to erase the old in pursuit of the new.

It was to let them coexist.

And there is something rather poetic about that in a city like Venice, where the past is not confined to museums but continues to function as the architecture of everyday life.

Of course, I would be doing Venice a considerable disservice if I discussed its cultural and architectural achievements without addressing what may have been some of the best seafood I’ve ever eaten.

I am a firm believer that a city should be experienced through its food as much as its buildings.

Venice makes a compelling argument for this philosophy.

Seafood tastes different when the water is not merely a distant geographical concept but an immediate and rather beautiful presence. The freshness, the simplicity, the distinctly Venetian preparations—there is something deeply satisfying about eating food that belongs so completely to its surroundings.

I cannot promise that every meal was objectively superior to every other seafood dish I’ve encountered in my life.

I can, however, report that nostalgia has already made the comparison entirely unfair.

And then there was Cipriani.

I have had a respectable number of Negronis in my life, but the one I had at Cipriani was particularly memorable.

It was, to use the appropriate technical terminology, a mean Negroni.

The kind that makes you briefly reconsider your tolerance for alcohol while simultaneously developing an unreasonable affection for the establishment responsible.

There is something about having a cocktail in Venice that makes the entire ritual feel slightly more sophisticated than it probably is.

Perhaps it’s the setting. Perhaps it’s the city’s long-standing relationship with pleasure, hospitality, and the art of doing absolutely nothing with considerable elegance.

Or perhaps a good Negroni is simply a good Negroni, and I have developed a habit of assigning philosophical significance to beverages I enjoy.

Both explanations seem plausible.

But the thing I remember most about Venice is not a particular building, painting, meal, or cocktail.

It is the atmosphere.

That peculiar, almost tangible sense of romance that seems to exist independently of whether you happen to be experiencing any yourself.

Venice is one of the few places I’ve visited that made me feel the presence of someone who wasn’t there.

I don’t mean a particular person.

I mean the idea of someone.

Someone whose hand I might have reached for while walking through a narrow street. Someone with whom I might have shared an unnecessarily long dinner, ordered another bottle of wine, or argued about which painting deserved another fifteen minutes of our attention.

Someone who would understand why I wanted to stop in the middle of a bridge simply to look at the light falling across a building.

I have traveled enough to know that being alone in a beautiful place is not inherently a tragedy. In fact, solitude has given me some of my favorite memories. There is a particular freedom in moving through a city without negotiating another person’s interests, appetite, attention span, or inexplicable insistence that we should probably head back to the hotel.

I like my own company.

I like discovering places on my own terms.

But Venice introduced me to a rather unexpected desire.

For perhaps the first time, I found myself wanting to return to a city not because I had failed to see enough of it, but because I wanted to see what it would feel like to experience it with someone I loved.

And I think there is an important distinction there.

I don’t want to return to Venice with just anybody.

I want to return with the love of my life.

Not because I believe a romantic partner is required to complete the experience. My first visit was extraordinary precisely as it was. I wouldn’t exchange it for a more conventionally romantic version.

But there is something beautiful about the possibility of revisiting a place that already means so much to you and allowing another person to become part of its story.

I imagine returning to the Guggenheim and discovering which paintings he gravitates toward. I imagine introducing him to the architectural details I remember, finding entirely new ones together, and discovering whether the seafood really was as extraordinary as I’ve spent the intervening years insisting.

I imagine another Negroni.

Perhaps two.

I imagine walking through Venice at night, when the city seems to withdraw from its daytime obligations and return to something quieter, more private, and infinitely more mysterious.

And I imagine the particular pleasure of looking at someone and knowing that the place you once loved alone has become somewhere you now love together.

There is a kind of romance in that which has very little to do with grand gestures.

It is the intimacy of shared attention.

Of having someone beside you who is interested not merely in the destination but in the way you experience it.

Someone who understands that when you point out a building, you’re not necessarily asking for an architectural critique. Sometimes you’re simply inviting them to notice something beautiful with you.

Perhaps that’s what Venice made me realize.

That some places are so extraordinary that experiencing them once creates two distinct desires: the desire to return and the desire to bring someone into the experience.

And yet, I don’t think I would have felt the same way had I visited Venice for the first time with a romantic partner.

There is something important about having fallen in love with the city independently.

It belongs to my own history before it belongs to any relationship.

Whatever happens in my life, Venice will always be the place I discovered in 2024, when I arrived without any particular expectation of finding my favorite city in the world and left having acquired a rather inconvenient attachment to it.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so certain I’ll return.

Not because I need to recreate the first visit.

I don’t think you ever can.

The person who returns to a place is never quite the person who first arrived there. Time changes us. Experience changes us. Love changes us. Even our memories become slightly unreliable, polishing certain details and quietly disposing of others.

The Venice I return to will inevitably be different from the one I remember.

And I will be different too.

But I rather like that.

Because the most interesting relationships, whether with people or places, are not necessarily the ones that remain unchanged. They’re the ones that continue to reveal something new as we become different versions of ourselves.

I went to Venice once.

I fell in love with its architecture, its art, its food, its unapologetic relationship with beauty, and its extraordinary ability to make the passage of time feel like something other than a loss.

I fell in love with a city that seemed to exist somewhere between memory and possibility.

And somewhere along the way, I found myself imagining a future in which I would return with someone whose presence would make an already beautiful place feel different in ways I cannot yet anticipate.

I have no idea when that will happen.

I don’t know who will be standing beside me, what our lives will look like, or whether I’ll still insist that Cipriani makes one of the best Negronis I’ve ever had.

But I know that when I return, I want to be very much in love.

With the city, certainly.

And, if life is feeling particularly generous, with the man standing next to me.

Because I fell in love in Venice once, and the next time I go, I hope to bring someone home to meet the city that had my heart long before he did.