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Venice is a place of paradoxes and delicious contradictions. A city improbably built on water. A crumbling, depopulating city that remains beautiful and crowded to discomfort. A living museum, a city that's no longer really a city - existing only to delight visitors. A place of the past, out of time, steeped in the mist of long-dead centuries. But artistically, a city at the absolute vanguard, hosting among other arts festivals the world's most famous contemporary art bash: The Venice Biennale. Every two years the Biennale festival draws the world's rich and fashionable to Venice to preen and party, and the world's art-conscious here to pace through endless galleries, scratch their heads and nod sagely. This year, as if shoehorning one last paradox into the mix, the best art in the Biennale wasn't really in the main Biennale... But we'll come on to that.

2007's Biennale was the biggest ever, with an unprecedented 77 countries exhibiting works and about 2,000 visitors trawling the festival's myriad gallery spaces every day from mid-June to late November. Warm critical reviews, combined with the current mania for modern-art-as-financial-invest ment, drew more curious culture-vultures than ever before. Like a kind of art-world Eurovision, each exhibiting country has its own dedicated 'paviglione' ('pavilion' to you and me) - usually filled with the work of a single artist. In the early years of the Biennale (it's been going since 1885), the pavilions were all set in the leafy Giardini - lovely permanent little buildings in wildly varying styles, and interesting as works in themselves. So the Hungarian pavilion is an Art Nouveau stunner with stained glass and copper inlays, the US pavilion is a miniature classical temple with Doric columns, the Australian pavilion is a cool, minimalist structure, and so on. But as the Biennale grew more popular and more countries started taking part, the old ship-building Arsenale area started hosting pavilion-spaces and now it's a joint main arena for the festival. (This year, for the first time, there was notably an African pavilion established in the Arsenale - a carnivalesque hangar stuffed with fun, stimulating works.) Other national pavilions, meanwhile, are temporarily set up in various venues scattered throughout the city.

Before you ask, it wasn't a great year for us Brits - represented this year by Tracey Emin. Although some of her neon renderings were striking, the spidery, pornographic drawings which dominated

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