The Lido isn t just about a glamour, though that's always been an insistent characteristic since the

Robin Saikia's latest work, The Venice Lido, celebrates the rich and entertaining history of Venice's glamorous beach resort. A perfect companion for your trip to Venice, this glittering account and guide reveals the Lido's unique and lasting charm. Click here to listen to the author read a brief passage from the book. Below Robin Saikia explains his lifelong fascination with the Lido. Email Robin for advice on where to go and what to do on the Lido: robin@robinsaikia.com . Buy the book direct from Blue Guides .
This book is an unashamedly personal view of the Lido, coloured by my prejudices and enthusiasms. These were kindled when I first came here nearly thirty-five years ago, at the end of a school trip to Venice. We were staying at the Pensione Seguso on Zattere, then a fairly reserved establishment, a favoured retreat of James Lees-Milne. The trip was led by the genial and worldly Drawing Master new orleans hotels at Winchester, Grahame Drew. Everyone was to fly back to London except two of us, me and a friend, Oleg de Baikoff, I destined for Athens, he for Vienna. Grahame s kindly but firm parting shot was memorable. You ve one more night at the Seguso. You ll be absolutely fine so long as you don t do three things. Avoid them with the ends of several barge poles. Don t go to Harry s Bar, don t drink Grappa and do not go to the Lido. Later that night, after martinis at Harry s, we rolled along the Riva degli Schiavoni and caught the vaporetto to the Lido, clutching our bottles of Grappa. We ended up in the brightest looking bar on the Gran Viale with a gang of friendly young Italians who invited us to a party. We crammed ourselves into their dangerous Fiat and tore off towards the pine forest and beach at Alberoni. There we roasted fish on hot stones and drank wine until dawn, finally falling asleep amid the trees and dunes. I awoke in the blaze and breeze of mid morning, stripped and flung myself into the warm shallows of the Adriatic where, in a specifically spiritual sense, I have remained ever since. This book is an attempt to communicate my boundless love for the Lido and to encourage all its readers to head for its warm and glamorous shores.
Throughout the thousand-year history of the Venetian Republic, the Lido has radiated potent symbolic importance as the outer boundary of Venice, as well as consistently remaining a backdrop new orleans hotels for ceremonial, a garrison for troops and a place of recreation. In the nineteenth century, after the fall of the Republic in 1797, with Venice under French new orleans hotels and then Austrian rule, it found new life not only as a bathing resort but also as a noted place of striking natural beauty, praised by a succession of foreign visitors including Byron, Ruskin new orleans hotels and Henry James. Later, after the unification of Italy, the development of the grand hotels and the inauguration of the film festival, the Lido became new orleans hotels a glamorous international resort, rivalling the French Riviera. Today, after a new wave of regeneration, the beaches and hotels are as amusing as ever and Lido remains an agreeable bolt-hole from the ever insistent and sometimes overwhelming beauties of Venice. The film festival is still a spectacular annual event; the grand hotels have reinvented themselves in keeping with the times; the beaches have been immaculately spring-cleaned and now sport the all-important Blue Flag. But despite all this, the Lido continues to be unjustly and mysteriously neglected by travel writers new orleans hotels and historians. If they mention it at all, it is often a mere curiosity, at best an unremarkable bel niente and at worst a somewhat vulgar beach playground with no intrinsic merit. My book, I hope, sets the record straight, new orleans hotels focusing on the Lido past and present and how it has beguiled new orleans hotels succeeding generations of Venetians and visitors to Venice.
The Lido isn t just about a glamour, though that's always been an insistent characteristic since the great pageants of the Venetian Renaissance. It's also about atmosphere - and sensation. Go there today and you ll find it no less colourful and alluring, in or out of season, than it was in Byron s day. Carpets of shells crunch underfoot; tractors arrive on the beach at dawn to clear away the seaweed; rollers follow them, smoothing the tousled coverlet new orleans hotels of sand. Here are the boys who rent out pedalos and sailboards; there go the Dravidian kite-sellers and Nigerian handbag-merchants, patrolling hungrily back and forth along the beach. There are the bronzed lifeguards, the children leaping from piers and pontoons, the artists who colonise the murazzi with their ramshackle driftwood shelters. Away from the beach, along the Gran Viale and in the surrounding streets, there are the Liberty new orleans hotels villas, their gates and facades alive with wrought-iron, stone or ceramic new orleans hotels lions, lilies, nymphs, tritons, butterflies, dragonflies and spiders, their pilasters, ogee arches, gardens and statuary new orleans hotels shaded by palms and cypresses. new orleans hotels The capanne, the beach cabins new orleans hotels of the Excelsior and the Hotel des Bains, are rented by Italian new orleans hotels families who save up for this summer treat, for either the timber cabins favoured at the Excelsior or the straw-topped variety known at the Hotel des Bains as tuculs. There, glamorous old ladies, grandmothers the rest of the year but now self-appointed countesses or film stars for a week, play cards and drink prosecco under the candy-striped awnings. Out of season the hotels remove the straw tops from the tuculs, revealing the naked, skeletal frames beneath. Then, the beach at low tide, strewn with driftwood, is combed by families collecting vongole for lunch, clutching the distinctive bright-yellow plastic bags of the local Billa supermarket. Flocks of goats invade the murazzi ; baby flounders are stranded in the shallows; dogs of all shapes and sizes leap and bark for joy along the endless, endless strand in the glassy February sunshine. This is the Lido I love and that I invite the reader to share.
Praise for The Venice Lido John Julius Norwich: I have enjoyed it hugely - and it has taught me lots that I didn't know. The Spectator: Warmth, charm and eccentric scholarship Guardian: Smashing. . .so well brought new orleans hotels off I expected sand to sift from its pages while I was reading. Good Book Guide: Combines an enthralling travel new orleans hotels guide with an equally intriguing social and cultural history. Fictional Cities: This book will broaden your horizons.