The last of the three days from this trip that never got written up at the time. Twelve years on, the photographs put it back together — twenty-three of them, which is the fewest of any day of the cruise, and they tell a story we did not expect.

The Silhouette came into Venice early and was alongside by nine. We flew home the following morning. So this was it: one day, our last, in the city everybody saves for last.

And here is the first confession. There is not a single photograph of sailing in. Everybody photographs sailing into Venice — it is the whole reason the ships go there, past the Salute and up the Giudecca with the whole city sliding by at deck height. We have nothing. We were presumably asleep.

It rained

It rained in Venice in July, steadily, all morning. Which nobody plans for and which turns out to be one of the better things that can happen to you there, because the day trippers thin out and the back canals go quiet and green and the whole city stops performing for about three hours.

Twenty minutes later we gave up walking and sat down under a parasol in an empty campo with the rain coming off the edge of it, and had a coffee, and watched nothing happen. It is on the short list of the best half-hours we have had anywhere.

A church we cannot name

At twenty past one we went into a church to get out of the weather. Columns down both sides, a dark timber ceiling, a big painted crucifix hanging over the chancel, and absolutely nobody in it. We have spent a fair amount of effort since trying to work out which one it was, and we cannot. Venice has something like a hundred and forty churches and a good half of them look like this from the door.

And then the lunch

We had lunch for an hour and a half and it was the best meal of the twelve days, better than anything on the ship, better than Greece, better than the farm above Sorrento. It was in a bacaro: white barrel ceiling, wooden fans turning, copper pans hung along the wall, a glass deli counter at one end, a clock, and every single table taken on a wet Saturday afternoon, which is the only recommendation a place in Venice actually needs.

It started with a seafood antipasto brought up on a raised stand, and a scallop baked in its own shell under breadcrumbs with prawns alongside, which is the single thing from this whole trip we would most like to eat again.

Then a pasta each, because we could not agree, which is a recurring theme of this blog.

Somewhere between the courses we went outside for air and the rain had stopped.

And it finished with a plate of little sugared biscuits and a glass of something dark and sweet to dip them in, which is exactly how a long lunch should end.

And here is the second confession, and the one that still annoys us. We took nine photographs of that lunch and not one of the sign. We do not know where it was. We have been back through every frame at full resolution — the name is printed on the café curtains in two lines and the light behind them burns it out completely. So it is somewhere in Venice, it is wonderful, and it is gone.

Six minutes in St Mark’s Square

The timestamps are quite clear about this. We arrived in Piazza San Marco at 15:24 and took our last photograph of it at 15:30. Six minutes. In the most famous square in Europe, at the end of a twelve-day cruise, on our only day in Venice.

In fairness, six minutes gets you a surprising amount. The clock tower, whose face is blue and gold and tells you the hour, the phase of the moon and the sign of the zodiac, on the reasonable assumption that a merchant leaving on a voyage wants all three.

And the mosaic over the far left doorway of the basilica, gold, showing the body of St Mark being carried in. The rest of the front was rebuilt over the centuries; this one is the old one, and it is worth the twenty seconds it takes to look up at it.

And that was the trip

Ten minutes after the last shot of the campanile there is one more photograph, indoors, of two extremely sunburnt people, and then nothing. That is the last picture of the cruise.

So: no Doge’s Palace. No Rialto. No Grand Canal, no gondola, no Murano, no Burano, no Bridge of Sighs. Six minutes in St Mark’s Square and an hour and a half at lunch.

We would not change it. We have been coming back to that lunch for twelve years and we have never once said “I wish we had seen the Doge’s Palace.” Venice will still be there. There is a version of travelling where you tick the list, and there is a version where you sit under a parasol in the rain in an empty square, and we have got steadily more certain about which one we are doing.

What we’d tell you

• If it rains in Venice, do not go back to the ship. The rain is the best thing that can happen to you there in July.
• Get off the tourist route and eat where the tables are full of people speaking Italian. Then photograph the sign. Learn from us.
• One day in Venice off a ship is not enough to do the famous things properly, so consider not trying. Pick one square, one church and one long lunch and you will remember it better.
• Set your camera clock before you leave home. Ours was six hours out for the first week of this trip and it took twelve years and a lot of cross-referencing to untangle.

That is the last of the twelve days. We wrote up what we had learned a couple of days after we got home, in Our Top 5 Things You Should Avoid Doing on a Cruise — and the port before this one was Katakolon.