Venice, desire, decay and the imagination : travels into the 'dark side'

I know precisely when Venice entered my imaginative world. I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s and I went with a group of friends to see Luchino Visconti's controversial film Death in Venice (1971), based on the Thomas Mann novella of the same name. There may have been earlier encounters with Venice at school or on television, but I don't recall them. It was the movie that created a rich interior world of images, desire, feelings and strong emotions that became a template for a precession of imaginings and for the embodied experiences (with which they were fused) of travelling to Venice. My Venice was not of picturesque renderings in contemporary tourism representations (with their loose and tenuous threads to populist notions of romanticism)(see the images and videos on Google Image and YouTube) but something darker, and more deeply felt, something that breathed the air of what may be termed a neo-Romantic construction and was a response to what, in the end, I regarded as a city befitting the description dystopian.