‘Torcello’ means ‘tower and sky’ but I thought it sounded like something you could eat or drink that was both sweet and delicious, possibly alcoholic. Bearing this in mind, and as it’s only a short hop on the vaporetto (water bus)  from Burano, it would have been just plain rude not to visit.

Everybody streamed off the vaporetto in the same direction, as though they all knew, by some means of collective consciousness, which direction to go.  We all trotted for the best part of a kilometre, under the searing sun, down a pathway, paved, pink and pretty, which ran alongside a still, green canal.

An unexpected busker was playing the accordion, temporarily drowning out the cicadas screeching in the parched bushes. I tossed a euro coin into the cap slung on the ground in front of him and he nodded, ‘Grazie.’

The ponte del diavolo – devil’s bridge – looked new and scrubbed, no sign of beelzebub though so to make up for the disappointment, I imagined a troop of horned, villainous, little devils in red sequinned suits dancing across it.

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