ABSTRACT
This chapter shows an intensely personal exploration of my imaginings of Venice, a place that is simultaneously of the mind and a material entity that has entangled various selves with particular, and highly selective, representations and performances. It aims to reconnoitre two ideas that have currency in travel scholarship: performing tourist places' and flirting with space' and in a manner where the personal, affect, emotions, the subjective, is central to my musings. Death in Venice was far more than a cinematic experience; he read it and experienced it as a rendering of my own thoughts, feelings, desires, a representation on screen of the possibility and the impossibility of same-sex love, infatuation, sexual obsession, male beauty. It haunts me still. The use of the term dystopia is intentionally problematic because for me it is about my imagined Venice and my traveller Venice and possibly far removed from the quotidian Venice of those who live and work.
