The last stop of the Grand Tour was the Venice Biennale, where I spent two days looking at the exhibitions. Spanning from Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies to Alfredo Jaar’s The End of the World, where cobalt, rare earths, copper, tin, nickel, lithium, manganese, coltan, germanium, and platinum are pressed into a four-centimetre-square cube displayed in a temple-like room bathed in red illumination.

Visiting Venice, it’s hard not to notice the sea creeping up on streets and buildings, and the water pouring up from the drains at Piazza San Marco. For how much longer will the city — one of the birthplaces of many of our modern practices, like the banking system — withstand the pressures of climate change?