Lido di Venezia

This guide to the Lido di Venezia in Venice starts inside the grand hotel behind you, where the novelist Thomas Mann spent an evening in 1911 unable to look away from a boy at a nearby table, an encounter that became Death in Venice. It follows how closely Mann's wife said the novel mirrored real life, the cholera outbreak the city played down that same summer, and the day decades later when director Luchino Visconti brought his cameras into the same corridors to film the story on location.