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I’m scarcely writing at the moment. I’m doing something stranger than fiction. I’m trying to drag a 700-year-old piece of marble out of the moist bowels of the Doges Palace in Venice.

It is that fascinating object, a Column of Infamy. It was erected to the eternal dishonour of one Bajamonte Tiepolo, Venetian nobleman.

Bajamonte’s plot to murder Doge Pietro Gradenigo dissolved into a bloody comedy of savagely ironic errors. A last-minute betrayal cost him the element of surprise. Then the heavens opened, drowning in wind and rain all Bajamonte’s plans for simultaneous strikes on San Marco from three different directions. The whole grandiose conspiracy was finally quashed after an old lady dropped a stone mortar-and-pestle on the head of Bajamonte’s standard-bearer, scattering brains and blood. When it was all over, Bajamonte Tiepolo’s palazzo at Sant’Agostin was razed, his family crest suppressed, the man himself consigned to perpetual exile, a kind of living death, the worst possible punishment for a Venetian. Except …

Except knowing that on the site of your destroyed home, your vengeful vanquisher, Doge Gradenigo, has erected a colonna d’infamia, a metre-tall column of white marble with an inscription to keep your name in perpetual odium. ‘For ever’, says the column, one of the earliest examples of stone script in Venice.

For this writer, the idea of a Column of Infamy has an irresistible appeal. What can compare with it by way of an insult? A libellous roman-a-clef? A spiteful scrawl of graffiti? A rancid blog? A perpetual icon at the top of every Google search? A malicious character assassination in a national newspaper? I don’t think so. This is an insult that becomes part of the fabric of the city: a phantasmagorical white effigy by moonlight, a harsh reality by day. It’s a urinal for the dogs, and for humans with some dog in their nature. (And don’t think Doge Gradenigo didn’t think of that when he put up the column.)

And it turns out that Bajamonte Tiepolo’s Column of Infamy has a story of its own, something stranger and perhaps sadder than even a novelist could invent.

For even in exile, Bajamonte Tiepolo could not bear the thought of it. One of his henchmen was sent in the night to destroy the column. He succeeded in breaking it in three pieces before he was caught in the act. The henchman was deprived of a hand and his eyes were put out. The column was repaired and re-erected. For a while.

Also implicated in the Tiepolo conspiracy were members of the Querini clan, one of whom was Bajamonte’s father-in-law, Marco. Family counts in Italy. Memories are long. It seems that in 1785, one Angelo Maria Querini asked the city if he could buy the column. No-one paid too much attention, it seems, when the shameful object was quietly sold off and a humble stone plaque embedded in the pavement. Loc. Col. Bai. The. MCCCX. says the broken slab, which almost seems designed to obfuscate all but those who speak abbreviated Latin and know fourteenth-century Venetian history.

Strangely, however, Querini did not destroy the column. Instead, he sent it to his villa in Altichiero on the mainland. Then it passed into the hands of the antiquarian Antonio Sanquirico, and finally to the heir of the Duke of Melzi, who used it as a garden ornament at a mansion on Lake Como. It was returned to Venice in 1838 by the last inhabitant of the villa, Duchess Joséphine Melzi-d'Eril Barbò, and it was briefly put on display in a courtyard of the Correr Museum. But some time, at least a hundred yea

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