📍 🇮🇹 Abandoning ambition at Lido

The time for Lido has come when one has absorbed enough of the mainland. At first, in the off-season, one feels like in the American movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), Jim Carrey peering at a blurry-orange Kate Winslet on the beach. All closed and cold in Montauk.

English author Henry James wrote that "the beach is still lonely and beautiful" but too much changed towards the end of the 19th century according to him: "when I first saw it, in 1869, it was a very natural place, just a rough lane, a bathing place, a restaurant, which was very bad, yet largely compensated by the warm evenings..."

"Today [James added in 1882] the Lido is part of a united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. Bitumen walks, gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops; the bathing establishment is bigger than before, and the cuisine is not even better..."

Never mind Henry James' problems. Strolling on the beach calmly, abandoning ambition and intensity, you should find the missing clues to your Venetian puzzle if you look carefully: the shells and the colors that inspired some of the town's design features...

Time to go home.

____ Sources ____

>> Henry James, "Italian Hours", 1882