Venice in Winter, With a Poet as Our Guide

By 2 a.m. we were happily lost again. Dimly illuminated arches and doorways reflected off the green canal waters. My daughter, Vivian, 16, and I were on a lion hunt in Venice, an annual occurrence for six years now.

If I felt slightly silly coming to this ancient tourist trap every year, I was comforted that arguably the world’s coolest tourist, the exiled Russian, Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, did the same thing for 17 winters, resulting in what many regard as the bible of travelogues, “Watermark,” published in 1992: 135 pages of vivid, profound, often funny impressionistic musings on the city Brodsky called “the greatest masterpiece our species ever produced.”

Brodsky’s fascination with Venice was colored by his childhood in St. Petersburg (then named Leningrad), another city of canals, where he’d lived in a communal apartment on a bustling street lined with czarist palaces. “I, too, once lived in a city where cornices used to court clouds with statues,” he wrote.

My own attraction was shaped by a Danish childhood next to the languorous waters of the Baltic Sea. As for Viv? Strolling the city is the only endurance sport we can both participate in as equals and where the setting trumps her phone screen. She is a warrior princess here.

Venice recently made headlines for charging a 5 euro admission fee to stem the Disneyesque hordes of summer fanny packers. (The fee is supposed to double in April.) But on this March night the city was as tranquil and evocative as an ornate tomb. A whiff of frozen seaweed blew off the Adriatic. Viv mischievously pulled out her cellphone, but we use map apps only as a last resort. “Not yet,” I said, and she put it back into her pocket.

We climbed the steps of yet another one of the city’s more than 450 bridges and peered around the next alley leading to a square where, lit up like an alter, was our lion.

The marble beast called the “Piraeus Lion” was plundered from Athens’s main harbor in 1687 and was as familiar to Viv and me as the family dog. It has become a touchstone for many of our walks. The star of four mismatched marble lions guarding the Arsenale gate to the city’s ancient fleet, the beast’s ferocity was mitigated by our knowledge that runes were graffitied into its flanks by marauding Vikings — our kinsmen!

I suppressed the usual desire to drone on about the lion’s 23-century history. Why kill intuitive beauty with data gleaned from tourist books? The real pleasure of…