Venice isn't only about romantic breaks. The city's dream-like beauty, drama and quirks will also captivate your children
There is nothing worse than going to places that are meant to be romantic with a partner. It ends not in tears but in 48-hour sulking. Venice is full of miserable couples eating terrible food, bored of each other and even more bored of looking at churches.
It doesn't have to be this way. I love Venice, even though I have paid my "couply" dues there. It is smelly, creepy and totally improbable. I love it in the way I love Las Vegas, which could only be made because they could pipe in water to create this fantasy in the desert.
Venice is equally fantastical and theme-parky. Built on water, stilts in silt. A ridiculous place flooding with increasing regularity. Every criticism that is made about it is true. Stinky, pricey, unreal. But if you cannot imagine that this is a place where anything could happen, your imagination needs some lubrication.
This is why I think the right approach to Venice is to dump the lovers and take your children, or anyone who needs to escape. I took my 12-year-old daughter, Angel, and my friend Lorraine, who has been looking after a sick relative, and her teenage daughter, Ruby.
Lorraine's main aim was to re-enact the scary bits of Don't Look Now. In Venice, I think whatever floats your boat is the right way to go. She had packed a red cagoule and a lot of time was spent with her running up on to bridges shouting: "Quick, take a picture." With me shouting back: "Kneel down. Look small and scary."
Venice is a place where you should do exactly what you want to do. Not trudge round with a guidebook "doing renaissance art". For, in fact, Venice is built on blood, money and lust, as well as on water, and was the place people came to satisfy all their appetites. The carnival masks to hide their identities, or their diseases, were not just on for a couple of weeks. People lived for months in disguise, indulging themselves. Decadence and decay reflect on water that moves from dank to shimmer in an instant.
My idea was to show the kids just something of the place and to do it on the cheap. That's impossible: nothing in Venice is cheap, but if you have kids, I recommend self-catering.
We stayed at Ca' Masena in Dorsoduro – it's beautifully equipped, with an outside patio. You are much better doing this than trying to squash yourselves into the small, ultra-expensive hotel rooms near Piazza San Marco. You can relax, make your breakfast in the morning, and then you can walk everywhere, or get vaporettos (waterbuses, also not cheap).
You may eat some of the worst meals of your life in Venice, unless you are a local or book months ahead. Thank God for prosecco is all I say. And stick to the snack bars and fabulous ice-cream joints. Do, though, fly to Marco Polo airport rather than taking a budget flight to Treviso. This is the bit where I would splash out money. Get a water taxi or motorboat from the airport to the city (from €100, motoscafivenezia.it). For me this is one of the most fabulous journeys in the world. Venice needs to be approached by water to understand just what it is and how it must have seemed centuries ago in all its imperial pomp.
Once inside its maze, walk and soak it all up. For kids, I recommend the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (704 Dorsoduro, +39 04124 05411, guggenheim-venice.it, open 10am-6pm daily, closed Tuesday, adults €14, under-10s free) near where we were staying. It really is one of my favourite museums. It's small enough to take in the collection and, because it was her home, she is buried in the garden alongside all her dogs. From her husband Max Ernst's pictures, to the Magritte and Picasso, to the gorgeous garden, it's a joy. Come home and decide if she was a poor little rich girl or, in fact, totally underrated as a collector.
Yoko Ono has sent a Wishing Tree to the garden. Of course. Loved-up students write beautiful wishes for world peace. My 12-year-old wrote: "I wish that David Cameron is publicly and hilariously humiliated." Oh well.
Later we met Rita Sartori, a lovely woman who was to take us on a ghost walk. There are all sorts of these tours, but Rita does something unique: it's not a ghost walk at all but a magical mystery tour by someone who knows and loves the city. Just some basic history is bloody enough for children.
Venetians don't walk through the entrance to Piazza San Marco as this was the site of public executions. Rita pointed up at one of the pinkish marble columns on the palace itself. A pink tinge turns to blood as this is where the death sentences were read out. The Bridge of Sighs is not about romance but torture. She took us down the tiniest of alleyways and to the Ponte delle Tette: literally the Bridge of the Tits. Prostitution is a huge part of Venetian history, too.
Then for me, the most beautiful of all. A bookshop with cats running wild and books piled everywhere in gondolas and bathtubs. An act of resistance against the flooding. A chaos of knowledge and wonder: Libreria Acqua Alta (Calle Longa Santa Maria Formosa). The children climbed up steps made of books to the roof. A brilliant thing to walk on old words. We saw no ghosts but, as Rita says, when she walks in Venice she is never alone.
The next day we visited Murano (a series of islands just to the north of Venice). Watching the famed glassmakers work is OK. For a bit. The after sales is not, nor is being mildly sexually harassed by the man who shows you around, but this is Italy, I suppose. We bought nothing, so I don't even think it works as a sales technique.
On our last night we did the gondola thing. I insist that this may be expensive and touristy, but at night it is unutterably weird and creepy, and because these boats can get down the tiniest of canals you glimpse the majestic top floors while actually being on the level of rotting, empty bottom floors. The gondolier spent most of his time on his mobile, as they do these days. Angel wore her cat mask. We loved it.
For this is like no other place. Save the guidebooks for later and wander. This is a city of peripheral vision. Just out of sight something lurks. Nothing is as it seems and it shouldn't really exist. But while it does, let its strange dreams seep into you, for they will never leave you. That's why it's perfect for children.
• Accommodation was provided by Ca' Masena (020 8743 2682, camasena.com) which sleeps four and has three-night breaks from £465, also available through Sawday's (sawdays.co.uk). EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Venice Marco Polo from Gatwick or Southend from £65 return