'Two." "And thirty thousand inhabitants." "Less than a hundred souls." Her eyes were brimming now, hers or mine. "I'm so sorry, darling." The canal runs straight from the landing stage into the heart of what is left of Torcello's great square. Now it's not even a village green. The great stone arches of the fifteenth-century bridges, the dazzling fondamenta, the might of empire literally fallen and overgrown. A wooden bridge crossed near a canal junction. A couple of cottages, a scruffy field or two, a few lanes of artichokes here and there in the dampish fields. A line of peach trees. Weeds and reeds. A tiny file of ducks. I sat on the canal edge. "It ... it sent a fleet of galleys to the Chioggia wars." My voice hardly reached a whisper. "It was a whole empire." It had even sent two Torcello agents to steal St. Mark's body from mighty Egypt. "Gone, dear." She was hugging me, kneeling beside me and rocking gently. "Don't be sad. You live too much inside your head. You must come out, darling." Lucky there was nobody else about.
