In Venice with JG Links
On the first Venice walk I did with JG Links, 30 odd years ago now, we started as we meant to go on – by making a beeline for a cafe he recommended. I wasn’t with him in person, you understand. But such is the deadpan conversational style of the walking guide he wrote to Venice that you can’t help imagining him there at your elbow, silver-topped cane in hand, as he guides you under a hidden sotoportego or suggests stopping for coffee at this little place he knows just round the corner.
JG’s Links’s distinctively pocket-shaped guidebook is called Venice for Pleasure and it was first published in 1966, which makes it 60 years old next year [ie 2026]. He establishes his unique voice early on when he says: “I promise to write as little as possible while we are walking; nothing is worse than having to read a guide book while walking and looking round, all at the same time.”
Over the decades this trademark insouciance has helped shift more than 150,000 copies of Venice for Pleasure and earned it a cult status summed up by the late journalist, bon viveur and Venice-lover Bernard Levin: “Not only the best guide book to that city ever written, but the best guide book to any city ever written.”
Given that Levin was writing in the 1970s, can this still be the case? I’ve always had a soft spot for Links’s book so on a recent visit I dusted off my copy and took it out for a spin – much as you might a vintage car – to see how well it still worked.
The first thing to say is that any other travel guide dating from the era in which Britain still produced elite car marques and England won the World Cup would be of mild curiosity value at best. Venice for Pleasure is different because, well, let Links explain: “this is, in a sense, a guide book. The trouble is that it is only half what a reader expects of a guide book: it is a guide to the pleasures of Venice without its pains.”
The pains he leaves out are the practicalities of getting there, where to stay and so on, and the general psychodrama of a city that’s in a perpetual state of self-disgust at having sold its soul to tourism. Links is happy to describe himself as “the perennial tourist” but his Venice is blissfully devoid of accordionists playing O Sole Mio. Conjuring the canals, bridges, windows, doorways, carvings, paintings and the fleeting shades of the long dead, he portrays Venice as a state of mind – his mind, and what a mind it was.
Born in 1904, Joseph Gluckstein Links – Joe to his friends – was a textbook polymath who claimed to hold the preposterous title of Keeper of the Queen’s Furs (fur was the family business) and in the 1930s collaborated with that master of the literary occult Dennis Wheatley on a series of “crime dossiers” containing “real” clues. He was also a seasoned tobogganer on the Cresta run – of course he was.
His love of Venice started in 1945 when he and his wife Mary Lutyens – daughter of architect Edwin Lutyens – spent their honeymoon here. Of the putative readers of Venice for Pleasure seeing the city for the first time he says, “Venice will have woven its spell around them and they will be captives for life”.
This was certainly the case with him. Until his death in 1997 he would return “two or three times a year”, always staying at that grande dame of Venice hotels, the Danieli. In the process he became an expert on both Canaletto, the chronicler in paint of 18th-century Venice, and the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Venice for Pleasure makes judicious use of colour plates of Canaletto’s paintings but Links wears his erudition as lightly and jauntily as a gondolier’s straw hat.
Take the opening of Walk 2 (there are four itineraries in all) covering the east of the island. This was my first foray into Venice for Pleasure all those years ago and the walk I chose again recently to road-test the book anew. “The first object” of the walk, he writes, “is to reach a charming cafe on one of Venice’s most attractive canals; the second is to enter another picture gallery. Fear not: it is a very special gallery and has but nine pictures…”
So off we rambled, Links’s deceptively casual prose digressing and backtracking in a way that perfectly captures how walkers negotiate the 3D crossword puzzle that is Venice’s devilish topography. He assures us there are many cafes “where this book may, without self-consciousness, be taken out and read while the objects it describes are ranged around.” And – Venice being a city that changes less than any other on earth – the cafes and the objects are still there, exactly as he describes.
His view of Venice may be partial – he admits he can’t tell you much about the Venetian people because he has “never lived among them” – but it is always clear-eyed. Acknowledging that the Most Serene Republic was built on “rapacity, intrigue and hard bargaining” he says of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, the Basilica di San Marco, that the reader may see it “as a lovely dream, a sea-borne vase of alabaster,” or equally validly as “a robber’s den… for almost everything in it was stolen”.
Half way through Walk 2 it occurs to him that it may well be lunchtime and if so “we could now cross the rio and … continue in a southerly direction to Vecia Cavana, favourite Venetian restaurant of that celebrated gourmet Mr Bernard Levin…” Well, it was lunchtime and besides I was curious to see if the restaurant was still there.
It is, so I went in and ordered spider crab followed by liver-and-onions, local style. On one side of me was a table of gondoliers in their stripy tops. On the other – I swear I caught a glimpse of an affable English gent taking the weight off his feet. As well he might for Joe Links has a lot of walking still to do.
Published online at telegraph.co.uk on April 3, 2026
