Venice is only nine square metres but it covers a lot more than that. If you're going to go, do what I did and take an artist. We managed to get an AirBnB on Giudecca, an island slightly set apart from the dense, intricate centre. With no cars, buses, or trains, the air was filled only with the soft sounds of water snaking its way under our feet. The vaporetto conductor was forgiving of my terrible pronunciation. It was just as well that we weren't the partying kind, as the last crossing was 8pm sharp every evening, no exceptions. Our second-floor flat was vast, light and airy, filled with hardback photography books. We couldn't believe our luck. Happily trapped, we made our own dinner with the cheapest, lushest fresh ingredients and watched every Venice-set film we could stream, pitting their ability to capture the place against each other. The Talented Mr Ripley came close, all that aspiration and marauding, but nothing managed to convey that awe-inspiring, somewhat eerie, soundscape.

Art was our draw. We took in the pavilions, even the one dedicated to the stateless. We stood in line to catch the live performance in the German pavilion, guarded by Dobermans. We thought they'd be ferocious but they were puppies, really, licking the hands of anyone who dared to put their fingers up to the fence. There were exhibitions everywhere. If I could show you this in my own Venice-set film, we'd be lower in the frame, jaws slack, awestruck in front of some giant canvas, metres of air above, anti-cruise ship signs clearly visible, almost halo-like, behind our heads.

I like to think I'd have had the same response to the work if it had been shown anywhere else, at any other time. But art isn't made or shown in vacuums. The gallery is not a neutral space, though its white walls work hard to give the illusion of blankness. The very existence of the national pavilions was proof of this blur. The universally applied splendour of Venice itself, the very stones of the city, tipped into banality, but the work on display did encourage us to look again. I took photos constantly, posting them with a fervour whenever the data or WiFi were strong enough, possibly confusing art and aesthetics, but I was excited to be living a certain way and I wanted everyone to see me seeing these things, high on recursion. No wonder Venice is sinking, holding all that weight.

The most famous bridge in Venice joins an interrogation room to a prison. Its English name was popularised by Byron for those sighing at their last sight of all that beauty before being locked up. We admired it from the street. Venice struck me as an inherently Romantic city, not in a strewn rose petals sense but totally a peaks of experience sense. Rather than ecstasy and agony, we were in a land of excess and decay, with something fertile unfurling in the ecotone. Excess and decay, you say? Why, isn't that the realm of billionaires? My artist companion and I got to Venice a couple of years after the Clooney-Alamuddin wedding, indulging in a bit of star touring, trying to trace the key places of their ceremony, voyeurs in a luxury zoo. When Serena felt like Italian for dinner, Alexis flew her there. He posted his W to Instagram in a diptych. A selfie grinning at his wife as she victoriously drained a glass of wine, followed by their point of view of the bow of the gondola, taken from their seat in the stern. These seemed to go on without much fuss, just the same kind of eye-roll at the scene-stealing and stage-setting of celebrities with plenty of money and little in the way of imagination.

But when the oftentimes richest and definitely most divorced man in the world decides to hire the whole kit and caboodle to remarry, well... The Venetians found themselves a new suite of global allies. "The location is very fitting," quipped Rutger Bregman on the second day of the Bezos-Sánchez festivities, on Elon Musk's platform. "The fall of the Republic of Venice is one of history’s most telling examples of how great civilizations can rot from within—not through external conquest, but through elite decadence and corruption." Nothing changed, of course, but widespread dissent was recorded, along with the guest-list, for use in a revolution that'll definitely happen, guys, subscribe to make sure you never miss an upload.

To be clear, I'm not claiming to be immune from the wedding-industrial complex. When it came to ours, my husband and I had a tiny legal ceremony and a big party. I still get the occasional wave of guilt about the money we spent. I rationalise and soothe myself in various directions, how the experience of the day was full of so many different kinds of love, weaving our connections together into ever stronger and safer binds. In the cold light of capital, too, when would we be able to put so much into our local economy? Show off our own arty home city? How else could we efficiently treat that many people to dinner? My unease about spending on something essentially temporary in celebration of something intended to be long-lasting does eventually ebb. A wedding, a festival, a performance - these aren't transactional exchanges. They're more ephemeral creations than an object or asset. You live through them and they live with you forever. Besides, whatever the final cost, we didn't hold an entire island hostage.

Optimism is a stretch in a sinking city. But I don't want to let fear and anger rot through what remains.

Maybe, for now, we can look up, take it all in, and just breathe out.