Venice

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of "Wartime Lies", and his wife, the historian and writer Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second home. The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the beaten tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on Venice's pivotal role in world literature, he was not the only one - Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his most illustrious predecessors. Muhlstein and Begley's Venice is a private view of a place which will forever inspire love and passion.