Paradise of Cities: Venice and its 19th-century visitors John Julius Norwich Viking, 283pp, £20 ISBN 067089401X

John Julius Norwich begins his latest volume with a disarming and perhaps disingenuous apology. "It may well be considered," he suggests, "that I have written enough about Venice"; and he contemplates the prospect that yet another work from him on the subject may be received "with something like dismay". But he knows that it will not.

This enjoyable book is as agreeable to read as it must have been to write. It gives much and demands little. The author, ever polite, wears his great learning lightly, and never lectures. He has no footnotes, apart from those that appear, in a comfortingly old-fashioned manner, at the foot of the page, and he reminds this reader of many things that she half knew and had half forgotten. The modest appendix, in true Christmas Crackers style, also by Norwich, reproduces the whole text of Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's", the rhythm of which, once reawakened, is guaranteed to vibrate in the memory for months. This is an endearing anthology of Venetian anecdotes and incidents, with little that is new and nothing that is not interesting.

Lord Norwich (his name really doesn't look right without the title) has tried to confine himself to Venice as seen through the eyes of its 19th-century visitors, but he has not been wholly rigorous in his selection. He includes Napoleon, who disliked Venice, and Byron, whom he himself dislikes, because he felt he had to. He has let in, at the other end of the scale, and slightly beyond his chosen time span, the outrageous Fr Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, be-cause he could not bear to leave him out.

Rolfe died in 1913, and several of his publications were, for good reason, posthumous, but his vitriolic descriptions of Venetian society include many of the figures here evoked more generously by Norwich and by contemporary observers. There is much interesting chronological overlap and we see some of the characters and some of the palazzi from contrasted perspectives. Norwich writes about them all as though he had attended all their salons - to which, unlike most of us, he would surely have been invited. His mother, Lady Diana Cooper, he tells us, first saw the Piazza San Marco in 1907, in the same year as Rolfe, when it was still lacking its campanile - and always maintained that it looked better without it.

Some of his characters, such as Byron, Wagner, Ruskin, Henry James and Whistler, belong to history: others, such as the archivists Rawdon Brown and Horatio Brown, belong to a different kind of history. Both the (unrelated) Browns appear in the Dictionary of National Biography, but not quite to Norwich's satisfaction. Rawdon's birth date, we are told, should be 1806, not 1803. Norwich is an overt consumer and diligent corrector of the DNB, and at times his footnotes appear as a kind of running commentary on that magisterial but outdated work, which has long been under revision. His mixture of amateur scholarship, academic expertise and inside knowledge is peculiarly beguiling. It comes as no surprise to learn that "virtually every word" of the work was written in that well-known literary club, the London Library.

The most striking previously unpublished passage comes from one Rowland Burden-Muller, born in 1891. He evokes his days as a boy in Venice staying in the Palazzo Ca' Cappello with his Aunt Enid, who was more widely known as the celebrated hostess, Lady Layard, widow of Sir Henry Layard of Nineveh. Little Rowland's mother insisted on his wearing his Eton suit in Venice "so as all possible use should be extracted from its cost and, being very Scotch, she insisted that I should top it with a Scotch bonnet with flowing ribbons. Thus garbed, I was taught how to row the gondola . . ."

Beneath the good nature, high spirits and variety of these handsomely illustrated pages one might detect an undercurrent of melancholy, the melancholy of the cold winters and of death in Venice. John Julius Norwich seems saddened by accounts of the raw winters and the frozen lagoon and snow-covered campi of the city, and records year after year as being "one of the coldest in Venetian history". Effie and John Ruskin were so cold in their vast room in the Hotel Danieli that they had to play indoor cricket to keep warm, having no other domestic comforts, and Browning died of bronchitis in his much-loved son's palazzo at the end of the gloomy month of November. (We could have done with more of the son, the strange but oddly sympathetic Pen Browning.) Wagner died of a feverish cold in February, and Henry James's cousin, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, committed suicide by throwing herself out of her bedroom window in January. Rolfe, shivering and penniless, wandered homeless on the Lido night after night, telling the suspicious police that he was " a writer studying the dawns".

Venice is not always light and bright and glittering. "Did young people take their pleasure, when the sea was warm in May?" asks the narrator of Browning's poem, but he answers himself mournfully in his last line - "I feel chilly and grown old."

Margaret Drabble's latest novel, The Seven Sisters, is out in paperback from Penguin

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