This little book offers a chance to travel back in time, to walk in the company of Byron, Pushkin, Shelley, Wilde, Goethe, Browning, Pound and Cocteau, as they respond to her provocations. Here we eavesdrop on those first remembered glimpses of the city, on meditations of her history and on that fascinating duality between the clarity of her surface – a Canaletto cityscape – and hermantic decadence.