Henry James loved Venice with a passion that no other city could inspire. As his biographer Leon Edel has written, "Venice was one of the greatest topographical love affairs of James's life." Or in James's own words in his essay "Venice: An Early Impression":

To spend one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere in church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in starlight gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the church - this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the preservation of reason.

James had visited Venice for short periods in 1869 and 1872 but his first extended stay in the city took place in 1881. He found lodging - "dirty apartments with a lovely view" - on the fourth floor of what is now called the "Pensione Wildner" at number 4161 of the Riva degli Schiavoni, overlooking the church of San Giorgio:

I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter came in at my windows to which I seem to have been driven in the ceaseless fidget of composition . . .

Here he completed the writing of Portrait of a Lady as well as a charming essay on "Venice" subsequently published in Italian Hours. "There was a great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on the Riva Schiavoni," he wrote in the latter, "and looking out at the far shimmering lagoon:

You soon recognise that it is not only the many-twinkling lagoon you behold from a habitation on the Riva; you  see a little of everything Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose the great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which has for an ugly Palladian church a success beyond all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of the immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness.

       Not far away, on the Piazza San Marco, lies James's favorite cafe, Florian's, where he passed many an hour watching the world go by while he ate breakfast or enjoying the music in the evening like the narrator in The Aspern Papers:

I sat in front of Florian's cafe, eating ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances. The traveller will remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches like a promontory into the smooth lake of the Piazza. The whole place, of a summer's evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices and light footsteps on marble (the only sounds of the arcades that enclose it), is like an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks and to a still finer degustation - that of the exquisite impressions received during the day. When I did not prefer to keep mine to myself there was always a stray tourist, disencumbered of his Bädeker, to discuss them with, or some domesticated painter rejoicing in the return of the season of strong effects. The wonderful church, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looked ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea-breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there.

       On other evenings, James would visit Mrs Katherine Bronson, a New Yorker who entertained a wide circle of literary guests (including Robert Browning) in thedrawing room of the Casa Alvisi which now forms part of the Hotel Regina, right across from the church of the Salute at the entrance to the Grand Canal. "Casa Alvisi," James wrote in a later essay:

is directly opposite the high, broad-based, florid church of S. Maria della Salute - so directly that from the balcony over the water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal, seems to find the key-hole of the great door right in a line with it; and there was something in this position that for the time made all Venice-lovers think of the genial padrona as thus levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few were those not seen to stop and to return. . . The house, in a city of palaces, was small, but the tenant clung to her perfect, her inclusive position - the one right place that gave her a better command, as it were, than a better house obtained by a harder compromise . . a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show, a box at the best point of the best tier, with the cushioned ledge of its front raking the whole scene.

       When he returned to Venice in 1887 James was Mrs Bronson's guest in the Palazzo Recanati-Giustiniani, a rather damp and insalubrious building adjoining the Casa Alvisi, but when he returned to Venice later in that same year he preferred to stay in the Palazzo Barbaro, the home of Daniel and Ariana Curtis, further along the Grand Canal.This was the palazzo which several years later became the model for the fictional Palazzo Leporelli where Milly Theale lives and dies in The Wings of the Dove. "The casements between the arches were open, "James wrote, "the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter towards them of the loose white curtain an invitation to she scarcely knew what."

       It was here, too, that James began work on The Aspern Papers inspired by an anecdote he heard while he was staying in Florence earlier in the same year. Set in Venice, the story takes place for the most part in a faded old palazzo modelled on the Palazzo Cappello near the Ponte Bergami not far from Venice's railroad station. This is how James describes it in the novella:

It was a house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. 'How charming!  It's gray and pink!' my companion exclaimed; and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career.But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the inverals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side.

     Close to the end of the story the unnamed protagonist pauses in front of Verrocchio's great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni opposite the Scuola di San Marco hoping that it may provide him with a way out of his dilemma. But the statue remains stubbornly silent:

I was standing before the church of Saints John and Paul and looking up at the small square-jawed face of Bartolommeo Colleoni,the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse, on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him.The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer; but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips. The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day - he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries - and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of. He could not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might

       In addition to exploring the city itself, James also visited one or two of the islands in the lagoon, notably the lovely deserted island of Torcello with its magnificant basilica decorated with mosaics. James was especially attracted by its peace and serenity: "Choose the finest day of the month," he wrote:

and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which animated her great colourists. It is a perfect bath of light, and I couldn't get rid of a fancy that we were cleaving the upper atmosphere on some hurrying cloud-skiff. At Torcello there is nothing but the light to see - nothing at least but a sort of blooming sand-bar intersected by a single narrow creek which does duty as a canal and occupied by a meagre cluster of huts the dwellings apparently of market-gardeners and fishermen, and by a ruinous church of the eleventh century. It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse.Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied. I stopped my gondola at the mouth of the shallow inlet and walked along the grass besidea hedge to the low-browed, crumbling cathedral.The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, over-frowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of ce-turies, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it.A delicious stillness covered the little campo at Torcello; I remember none so subtly audible save that of the Roman Campagna. There was no life but the visible tremor of the brilliant air.

He was less impressed, however, by the mosaics themselves:

The church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome - St. Clement and St. Agnes.The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaicsof the twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms - intensely personal sentinels of a personal Deity. Their stony stare seems to wait forever vainly for some visible revival of primitive orthdoxy.