It is a question that has perplexed literary scholars for years: how could Shakespeare display such intimate knowledge of Venice in his plays without ever having visited the lagoon city? Now Italian academics have challenged the widely accepted view that the Bard never travelled to Venice but gleaned information from Italian merchants who came to London on business.

In a new book Shaul Bassi, a lecturer at Venice University, and the writer Alberto Toso Fei say Shakespeare's insights have such a “local feel” that he must have gained them at first hand.

“Most scholars believe that what Shakespeare knew about Venice must have been the fruit of wide reading and his contact with Italians,” said Mr Bassi. “But the local references —- implicit as well as explicit —- are so numerous they point to an alternative hypothesis: what if he did come here after all?”

In their book Shakespeare in Venice the authors have devised an itinerary taking visitors to the places that the Bard would have seen as he explored La Serenissima. Mr Bassi said that Venice in the 16th century was a global centre “much like New York today”.

About a third of Shakespeare's works are based in Italy, such as The Merchant of Venice, or make specific references to events and locations in Italy. There is no concrete evidence that Shakespeare ever left England, and the most widely accepted theory is that he gleaned background information from Italian travellers and merchants, including Venetians, whose glass and other products were highly prized in Elizabethan England.

He is also thought to have had a working knowledge of Italian and to have befriended John Florio, the Anglo-Italian translator and lexicographer, who lived from 1553 to 1625.

Mr Bassi and Mr Toso Fei accept that the frequent references in The Merchant of Venice to the Rialto Bridge — the nerve centre of Venetian commerce and gossip — did not prove that Shakespeare had seen it, since its fame as a “marvel of engineering” had spread to London.

On the other hand, it was striking that he had given the name “Gobbo” to Shylock's servant, a reference to the carved figure of a hunchback (Il Gobbo di Rialto) on the bridge, a feature well known in Venice but not beyond it. Shakespeare had also used local words such as gondola, as in Act2, scene 8 of The Merchant, when Salarino remarks: “But there the duke was given to understand that in a gondola were seen together Lorenzo and his amorous Jessica.”

In Othello Roderigo tells Brabantio, Desdemona's father, that she has been “Transported with no worse nor better guard but with a knave of common hire, a gondolier” (Act1, scene1). Shakespeare knew about the Venetian custom of offering pigeons (“a dish of doves”) as a gift, and showed rare insight into cosmopolitan Venice's ethnic and social relations, and its tolerance of foreigners and minorities.

Mr Toso Fei said it was “not by chance that Shakespeare's protagonists in his Venetian plays are Shylock the Jew and Othello the Moor”. He said that Venice was full of images held to depict Arabs or Saracens, both known as “Moors”.

These include the figures that strike the hour on top of the clocktower on St Mark's Square, the Torre dell' Orologio (called by Venetians the Torre dei Mori), and the carved figures of the Tetrarchs at the entrance to the Doge's Palace, which local legend says are Moors “turned to stone” for trying to rob St Mark's of its treasures.

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game