Maggie in Venice

ABOVE: Maggie gets up close and personal with Johnny Depp's familiar scent.

In our Venice Travel Blog, we posted a video earlier today titled "Johnny Depp's Palazzo in Venice." The video shows a house on the Grand Canal that the star of Edward Scissorhands, Pirates of the Caribbean, and (more recently) The Tourist just bought for a reported 10 million euros.

Since this blog is about Maggie, we thought you might be interested in hearing about the role that she played in helping us scoop the mainstream media with our paparazzi video. In the clip below, you'll see the palazzo, followed by actual footage of Maggie sniffing at the back door of Johnny Depp's new holiday home to confirm that the star had been there recently.

Trivia notes for "Making of" fans:

• Before finding our way to the palazzo, we refreshed Maggie's scent memory from last year by having her sniff a photo of Johnny Depp from a local newspaper, La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre.

• We also downloaded a digitized scent file from a Hollywood film-industry site,  Scentsofthestars.com.

• Maggie had no trouble remembering Johnny's scent, since she spent a considerable time trying to track him down during the filming of The Tourist in Venice.

Here's our video, shot earlier today, of Maggie putting her nose to the grindstone (or at least to the stone sill of Johnny Depp's back door) as a service dog for the entertainment-gossip industry: