Lido di Venezia Site Features

The Lido is the one part of Venice built in the age of the motor car, and it looks it. Where the historic centre is medieval and Gothic, the Lido is almost entirely late 19th and early 20th century, laid out on a grid of broad tree-lined streets rather than calli.

Its defining style is Liberty, the Italian form of Art Nouveau: the villas along the Lungomare and the side streets off the Gran Viale carry the characteristic wrought-iron balconies, floral tilework, and asymmetric towers of the style, built as private summer houses for Venetian and foreign families between roughly 1900 and 1915.

Two hotels anchor the seafront. The Hotel Excelsior of 1908 is a deliberate Moorish fantasy -- horseshoe arches, minaret-like towers, patterned brick -- built to signal exoticism to an international clientele. The Hotel des Bains, a decade older and far more restrained, is a straightforwardly neoclassical block whose fame rests on Mann rather than its facade.

The Palazzo del Cinema of 1937 belongs to a different regime and aesthetic entirely: a stripped, monumental Rationalist building of the Fascist period, its flat planes and severe symmetry deliberately at odds with the Liberty villas around it.

The Palazzo del Cinema hosts the Venice International Film Festival each year, drawing filmmakers and press from around the world to what is otherwise one of the Lido's quieter stretches.

The Church of San Nicolò, at the island's northern end, holds relics of St. Nicholas -- the remainder are in Bari -- along with paintings by Palma the Elder and Palma the Younger, set around a series of cloisters.

The Gran Viale, the island's main street connecting the vaporetto landing to the beachfront, is lined with shops and cafes and doubles as the easiest starting point for exploring the Lido's Art Nouveau side streets by bicycle.

The Lido is a 12-kilometer sandbar forming the boundary between the Venetian Lagoon and the open Adriatic, one of several barrier islands that shape the lagoon's ecology. Its ocean-facing side is a continuous sand beach, while the lagoon-facing side is more built up, with small canals and a townscape closer in scale to Venice itself.