Venice is a city that drives obsession like no other. Romance certainly plays its part in this, but there is also a darker edge to this unique location – one more difficult to explore in the context of a holiday visit. We’ve even heard of one man who became so enamored of the place that his town house gradually become a literary shrine to it, piled high with photography books of the Venetian cityscape and travel guides beyond count.

For the next few days, we’ll be presenting our own slightly off-kilter look at Venice. It’s a fascinating subject. Let’s just hope that this doesn’t develop into something bigger than any of us can control, with every post from now on dedicated to rainfall measurements and gondola etiquette.

There’s something very special about works of art that really capture the essence of a place, and feed something of their own back into the mixture.

Let’s kick things off with some background. For us here at Maps Explorer, two cultural monoliths inform the way we think about the city: Nicolas Roeg’s chilling cinematic masterpiece Don’t Look Now, in which a tortured father played by Donald Sutherland pursues the spectre of his drowned infant daughter through the haunted city, and, of course, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a book which details obsession of a very different, and no less sinister, variety. There’s something very special about works of art that really capture the essence of a place, and feed something of their own back into the mixture. Both of these do exactly that.

Fortunately, the peerless Luchino Visconti directed a beautiful Mahler-drenched adaptation of Mann’s novella, so a back-to-back evening of dark, compelling cinema might very well be in order. If you can stomach these studies of the human psyche’s strangest nooks and crannies, you’ll be more than qualified to read on as we pursue the real Venice in the days to come…