When I started The Secret of the Tirthas, Venice was high on the list of possible portals for Lizzie’s garden. However, it wasn’t until the fifth book, The Unknown Realms, that I finally found the right storyline for it.
I was lucky enough to spend a long weekend in Venice a few years ago, when a friend got married there. My wife had visited before so she knew some interesting spots – and cut throughs – that were less crowded.
Venice has a special hold on the imagination of many people in Europe. Obviously the main reason for this is its sheer, phenomenal beauty – its gondolier-strewn canals, its baroque bridges and buildings, its beautiful squares and churches. But it also resonates because of the subtle, bohemain air of dilapidation. Once the greatest port and trading post on the Mediterranean, it is now, as a lived-in city, dying. Its native population has declined by well over 50% in the last 100 years.
For these reasons, it made the perfect setting for the doom-laden chase involving Lizzie, the demon Pisaca, and the bean-nighe, or banshee. And for the miraculous, out-of-this-world experience that Lizzie has shortly afterwards, in the boat of the mysterious gondolier.
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