The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Venetians had brought about the reconciliation of Pope Alexander III and Frederick
Barbarossa in 1177; the grateful Alexander is supposed to have given the doge
the first of the gold rings with which Venice was symbolically married to the Adriatic.
It’s more likely that the essential components of the ritual – the voyage out to
the Porto di Lido in the Bucintoro with an escort of garlanded vessels, the dropping
of the ring into the brine “In sign of our true and perpetual dominion”, and the
disembarkation for a solemn Mass at the church of San Nicolò al Lido – were all
fixed by the middle of the twelfth century. Unless you steadfastly shun all the public
collections in Venice, you’re bound to see at least one painting of the ceremony
during your stay. Nowadays the mayor, patriarch and a gaggle of other VIPs annually
enact a sad facsimile of the grand occasion. And in case you’re thinking of
launching a salvage operation for all those gold rings, a fifteenth-century traveller
recorded – “After the ceremony, many strip and dive to the bottom to seek the
ring. He who finds it keeps it for his own, and, what’s more, lives for that year free
from all the burdens to which dwellers in that republic are subject.”
In the twelfth century the Lido was an unspoilt strip of land, and it remained so into
the nineteenth century. Byron used to gallop his horses across the fields of the Lido
every day, and as late as 1869 Henry James could describe the island as “a very natural
place”. Before the nineteenth century was out, however, it had become the smartest
bathing resort in Italy, and although it’s no longer as chic as it was when Thomas
Mann installed von Aschenbach, the central figure of Death in Venice, as a guest at the
Lido’s Grand Hotel des Bains, there’s less room on its beaches now than ever before. But
unless you’re staying at one of the flashy hotels that stand shoulder to shoulder along
the seafront, or are prepared to pay a ludicrous fee to rent one of their beach hutches
for the day, you won’t be allowed to get the choicest Lido sand between your toes.
If you’re the sort of person who regards access to the sea as a God-given right, then
you’ll have to content yourself with the ungroomed public beaches at the northern
the southern islands
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The Lido
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