Pensione La Calcina is one of John Ruskin’s houses in Venice. He stayed here in 1877, after completing The Stones of Venice and going mad, and there is a plaque for him on the wall: a stone of his own. It is next to the Swiss consulate on the Zattere, but never mind them. I think the Zattere is for people who have tired of Venice. It has a view to the Giudeccacanal, and the waterbus to the airport: to the exit. You can breathe here. I am staying in San Marco, where I can’t. My son falls from a water gate into a canal, and Italian grandmothers tut at us, and we get sick, which my friend says is ‘very chic in Venice’. Before we get sick, we eat at La Calcina.

If Ruskin were alive, he would be a Nimby

It looks like a tiny, ruddy fairy tale castle: a Scottish house yearning for fortification. (No Scottish building is too small for fortification, and I love them for it, as I feel the same way.) It is an inn, not a grand hotel – before he went mad Ruskin stayed at the Danieli – and the ground floor is a restaurant with picture windows to the Giudecca canal. It is quite understated for Venice (but I have been to Caffè Florian). It has yellow walls and grey velvet chairs; red Venetian blinds; a Murano glass chandelier with shades that look like little gold hats; sunburst mirrors; putti; some good art and some bad art, including a man’s face made of fruit.

The concierge shows me Ruskin’s bedroom, which has a view of the canal but not of Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore church, which Ruskin hated. He called Palladio ‘virtueless and despicable’ and said it was ‘impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard’ than San Giorgio Maggiore. Grumpy.

If Ruskin were alive, he would be a Nimby. He hated the rail bridge – perhaps because his wife loved the occupying Austrians who built it – and had a panic attack when he saw gas lamps at the Foscari Palace, because they reminded him of Birmingham. Other bits of Venice were ‘as nearly as possible like Liverpool’. The inhabitants of Venice revolted him. ‘Knots of men of the lowest classes… lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children… gamble and fight and snarl and sleep… clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch’. Yet he also whined about tourism: ‘the waves which have been the ministers of majesty become her sepulchre [blah blah blah]’. So Ruskin is a traveller, not a tourist: aren’t we all? I thought the same about myself, until I ate a cheese and ham toastie at Bar Americano in St Mark’s Square, did a self-guided tour of Indiana Jones’s Venice, and sat in the Ca’ Macana mask academy watching my son paint a papier-mâché crocodile.

We are tended by a fierce and ancient signorina who handles us with practised charm. Buona sera, I say, as we enter. Hello, yes, she replies (this always happens). We sit at a table with vast golden candlesticks and order with the lack of imagination expected of the English tourist. Venetians eat cuttlefish and crab from the lagoon: there is no pasta native to Venice, because there is nowhere to grow it. (There is a sullen vegetable island called Sant’Erasmo which I always mean to visit but never do.) We order mushroom risotto and lasagne. Both are perfect, and we are fortunate to find them, but they only add to the sense of eating inside an exhausted dream where people know you are English from the back.