In ‘Venice, Venice’, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Norman M. Klein undertake a circuitous exploration of Venice through a series of dialogues and site visits to Little Venice, London and Venice Beach, Los Angeles. Through these dialogues, Joseph-Lester and Klein attempt to locate the enduring images of Venice within a shared cultural imaginary and identify the function and meaning the Italian city has within both the historical and contemporary context of London and Los Angeles. They propose a four-fold layering, made up from historical pinpointing (city state and industrial development), from functional purpose (coastal position and commercial transportation), from mythical dimensions (Romantic-related, idealist and movie-driven) through to the carnivalesque, with echoes of Guy Debord’s society as spectacle (1967) and Coney Island allusions. There are slippages in time, between the real and the imaginary, and in the status of the Venices revealed. There are the imagos (collective mental pictures) and the symbolic notions of Venice here too, and finally, the tension of opposites between the grand and the ruin, appearance and disappearance, contemplative space and energized city. These concepts are conjured by site visits and in turn through the ‘to and fro’ of dialogue, anecdote and memory, the tread on the canal paths, a scene observed, a character surfacing and image capture.