To many people, Venice is quite simply the most beautiful city in the world. At first sight it appears like a dream - its breathtaking architecture and almost overwhelming weight of centuries. It is a city of many contradictions - something grand but faded, magical yet ghostly, beautiful but with a dark, sinister undercurrent running through its canals, and a pervasive sense that a second spectral city exists beneath the facade of everything you see. In this book, photographer Simon Marsden invites you to step away from the plastic souvenirs and the gaudy masks of the carnevale and enter this ghostly world. He reveals the "Bridge of Sighs" as it must have seemed to the friends of prisoners who were marched along it to their death, "The Island of the Dead" with its barred and locked door set low on the water-line, the peeling walls of a once proud palazzo, the mossy steps of a canal-side residence, a gilded funeral gondola, a solitary cloaked figure walking home from carnival and St Mark's Square in winter shrouded in white as an icy mist sweeps in from the sea.