In 1891, Camillo Boito (1836-1914) published the definitive edition of his short stories collection Storielle vane. Among them, three short stories, the famous Senso, Il collare di Budda and Il maestro di setticlavio deal with a successful nineteenth-century literary cliché: illegitimate love affairs in Venice. Boito was close both to Scapigliatura and verismo and tends to write objectively. However, in all three of his Venetian short stories, each plot is for him an occasion to rewrite the cliché through caricature. The purpose of this paper is to study the clash between an apparently measured objectivity and an ironic deconstruction of a well-established cliché. It is particularly necessary to focus on Boito’s tendency to tell a story through the apparently objective point of view of what eventually appears to be a caricatural, somewhat grotesque, character: this is for example obvious in Il collare di Budda and Senso, while in Il maestro di setticlavio, Boito belittles the cliché with two mediocre lovers who are surrounded by caricatures, in a bleak and dingy Venice. Although it is at first sometimes hard to perceive the excesses of caricature behind Boito’s measured style, his incisive irony is a way to emphasize the evolutions of Nineteenth-century Venice. It also reflects the writer’s pessimism and his criticism of the hypocrisy and delusion in which many of his contemporaries lived.