As I watched a pair of patrolling policewomen politely but firmly telling the tourists eating McDonald’s on the steps beside the Basilica di San Marco to move on immediately, it occurred to me how the course of art history might have changed if the new rules for visitors to Venice had been in force in Turner’s day.

JMW Turner spent days in St Mark’s Square and on the steps of churches all over Venice, drawing in a sketchbook on his knees. And judging by his output — he covered more than 500 sheets of paper with about 1,000 images — it looks as if he didn’t waste a moment by packing up at lunchtime.

But even more disruptive to his work than the ban on picnicking in heritage sites (introduced by the city council this summer) would be the rules against lingering on the city’s bridges and using unofficial gondoliers.

Turner’s obsession with capturing the nuances of light on water led him to spend many hours looking from bridges and bobbing about in gondolas on the Grand Canal and the Bacino, drawing until the light disappeared.

His romantic and mysterious watercolours of Venice by moonlight, vaporous views of the city outline, and detailed studies of well-known landmarks can be seen, alongside such famous oil paintings as The Dogana from the Steps of the Europa, in Turner in Venice, an exhibition of nearly 150 of his works which opened this week at Tate Britain in London (the exhibition closed on January 11, 2004).

The quantity of Turner’s output is astonishing, considering that he spent less than four weeks in all in Venice, on three “city breaks” of little over a week each — whirlwind visits by 19th-century standards — spanning 20 years.

And what is so marvellous for 21st-century visitors to Venice is that so many of the views he depicted can still easily be found, thanks to the city’s timelessness; the constantly changing light falling on a virtually unchanged profile and labyrinthine interior.

Though equally, the misty abstract quality of many of his works means that landmarks are hard to identify. The Tate found this when hanging the exhibition, discovering that two oil paintings formerly identified as views of Venice turned out to be of rather less sexy Portsmouth.

On a recent visit in search of Turner’s Venice I stayed at the San Clemente Palace, a luxury hotel which opened this spring, converted from a 17th-century monastery, on its own island in the lagoon. The slight inconvenience of being tied to a timetable for the 15-minute shuttle crossing to San Marco was made up for by Turneresque views across to the Bacino di San Marco, with the Redentore on the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore in the foreground, and the white dome of the Salute between. On waking, the pale grey dawn sky shot with pink and yellow behind the distant top of the Campanile in St Mark’s Square, with the vast expanse of water rippling gently in front, made me wish I had Turner right there with his watercolour box at my window.

On any short break to Venice a three-day vaporetto pass is a worthwhile investment, but especially when on the Turner trail. On the number 82 between San Giorgio and Zitelle (next to the Cipriani on the Giudecca) looking north, that’s as near as dammit to his Venice, from the Canale della Giudecca, Chiesa di S. Maria della Salute, a blue-skied oil painting he did on his return from his last visit in 1840.

There is the Salute, the Campanile and the Doge’s Palace, though the water looks even murkier and more filled with boat traffic than it does today.

Turner spent much of his time on the Grand Canal. On his first visit in 1819 he stayed in the Albergo Leon Bianco, no longer a hotel, between the Rialto bridge and Palazzo Grimani.

My companions and I indulged ourselves with a water taxi costing £35 from the railway station at the head of the Grand Canal to San Marco, to enjoy far better views of the palazzi and the Rialto bridge, drawn in pencil and watercolour by Turner from gondolas, than would be possible on a crowded vaporetto. Although if you can get a seat outside at the back of the slow number 1 down the Grand Canal, you can have almost the same experience for the price of a bus ticket.

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