Marietta by F. Marion Crawford

The sun was high over Venice, gleaming on the blue lagoons that lightly rippled under a southerly breeze, filling the vast square of Saint Mark's with blinding light, casting deep shadows behind the church and in the narrow alleys and canals to northward, about the Merceria. The morning haze had long since blown away, and the outlines of the old church and monastery on Saint George's island, and of the buildings on the Guidecca, and on the low-lying Lido, were hard and clear against the cloudless sky, mere designs cut out in rich colours, as if with a sharp knife, and reared up against a background of violent light. In Venice only the melancholy drenching rain of a winter's day brings rest to the eye, when water meets water and sky is washed into sea and the city lies soaking and dripping between two floods.

But soon the wind shifts to the northeast, out breaks the sun again, and all Venice is instantly in a glare of light and colour and startling distinctness, like the sails and rigging of a ship at sea on a clear day.