This itinerary traces the splendid season of Art Nouveau andArt Deco, offering a bicycle ride among villas, avenues and grand hotels to attempt a reading of some of the island’s most significant architectural and urban presences.

The itinerary faithfully reproduces the choice implemented by Giovanni Sicher – an architect active during the turn-of-the-century urbanization phase of the island – in a photographic anthology published in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Great War: the resulting list composes a valuable testimony – live, so to speak – of the first urbanization of the Lido, the one still entirely focused on the island’s tourist destination. It is no coincidence that the itinerary is characterized by a particular concentration in the area of the Quattro Fontane bridge, along the access canal to the former summer headquarters of the Casino, in the immediate vicinity of theHotel Excelsior. In fact, it was precisely around this hotel – inaugurated at the dawn of the last century – that the center of the island was to be organized, a sort of new Marcian area, to which the presence of the procuratie (called in those years Procuratie del Lido) was an unmistakable reference. One more feature that enhances the documentary value of this collection: the photographic anthology by Giovanni Sicher allows for an immediate comparison almost a century later between the original layout and the current conditions of preservation of these villas, showing – in case – what and how many modifications and superfetations have intervened in the meantime; and, in the cases of demolition of the buildings, it represents a precious and rare testimony of that type of building and of the lost examples.