History

When the Marsich brothers broke ground on the Lido in the late 1890s, the narrow sandbar separating the Venice lagoon from the Adriatic was still largely undeveloped. The brothers, trained in the ornate idiom then sweeping northern Italy’s resort towns, designed a structure whose scale was deliberately theatrical: a six-storey central block flanked by two five-storey wings, the whole composition stepping forward on a raised entrance platform supported by ten columns. A park of mature trees wrapped the landward side, giving guests the unusual sensation of standing between forest and sea.

The doors opened at seven in the evening on 5 July 1900. By the standards of the day the hotel was extraordinarily modern: electric lighting throughout, telephone connections, hydraulic lifts, private bathrooms, and refrigerated storage. The Lido season ran from June to September, and within a decade the des Bains had become a landmark of European aristocratic summer culture, welcoming delegations from Venice’s nascent film festival as well as artists, writers, and crowned heads.

The hotel’s most consequential guest arrived in the summer of 1911. Thomas Mann, already famous for Buddenbrooks, checked in with his wife and brother and observed, from the hotel terrace and beach, a young Polish boy whose beauty he found unsettling and magnetic. The notes he kept that summer became the novella Der Tod in Venedig, published the following year. Mann’s prose transformed the des Bains into a stage for the conflict between artistic discipline and sensuous surrender — a reading that would shape how European culture perceived the Lido for the rest of the century. A room on the upper floors was subsequently named the Thomas Mann Room in his honour.

The hotel closed during the First World War and reopened in 1919 to a changed Europe. The interwar decades brought a second golden age: the launch of the Venice International Film Festival in 1932 added a layer of cinematic glamour to the des Bains’s established literary prestige, and for decades the hotel served as the unofficial headquarters of the festival, hosting juries, premieres, and the kind of encounters that later became film industry legend.

Luchino Visconti returned to Mann’s source material in 1971, filming his adaptation Morte a Venezia extensively on location, with some interiors recreated at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The des Bains itself played the hotel of the doomed composer Gustav von Aschenbach, its Liberty corridors and terraced beach providing images that became inseparable from the film. After the hotel’s eventual closure in 2010 — following an abortive attempt to convert it into a residential complex, the “Residenze des Bains”, that stalled partway through construction — the building entered a prolonged state of suspension. In June 2025 a €200 million joint venture between Italian asset manager COIMA and Abu Dhabi-based Eagle Hills was announced, with the stated aim of restoring the des Bains as a luxury resort while preserving its listed Belle Époque fabric.