The Excelsior, inaugurated in 1908 to a design by Giovanni Sardi, instead speaks a more theatrical language: domes, Moorish arches, Byzantine and orientalizing references compose a fa\u00e7ade designed to amaze those arriving from the sea. Observing them without the red carpet means grasping two different forms of prestige: the aristocratic seclusion of the Des Bains and the cosmopolitan spectacularity of the Excelsior.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Alongside the hotel memory, the institutional core of the festival speaks another language: that of the public twentieth century, made of orderly fa\u00e7ades, ceremonial entrances and spaces designed for crowds. The Palazzo del Cinema, inaugurated in 1937 to a design by Luigi Quagliata, was created to give a permanent home to an event that until then had had a more society-oriented and experimental character.<\/p>\n Not far away, the Palazzo del Casin\u00f2, opened in 1938 and linked to the name of Eugenio Miozzi, completes an urban system in which entertainment, representation and cultural policy intertwine. The architecture does not seek the Venetian picturesque: it prefers clear volumes, perspective axes, stairways and forecourts, a rationalist vocabulary softened by its seaside function.<\/p>\n Walking here without the red carpet allows one to see the staging of space more clearly: the avenues converge toward buildings that are not simple containers, but civic signals. They tell of the idea of an organized, official modernity, built to transform a summer shore into a permanent stage.<\/p>\n To read this stretch without the catwalk effect, one can start from the Santa Maria Elisabetta landing stage and follow the Gran Viale to the Adriatic front. The sequence is instructive: low shops, gardens, early-century small villas, then the sudden opening toward the sea. It is a small piece of urban direction, designed to accompany the visitor from Venice of the water to modern holidaying.<\/p>\n On Lungomare Marconi the gaze changes pace. Before the official signs, distances matter: gates, setbacks, pines, terraces, monumental entrances. Here the historic hotels should not be observed only as society backdrops, but as machines of representation created to host long seasons, sea treatments, receptions, screenings, expectations.<\/p>\n Arriving toward the Palazzo del Cinema and the Casino, it is worth turning around often. Twentieth-century memory is not only in the famous fa\u00e7ades: it is in the relationship between avenues, beach, public architecture and side routes, where the international ritual lets an everyday and precise geography emerge.<\/p>\n Walking on the Lido outside the days of the Festival means removing the place\u2019s loudest image and rediscovering the traces that support it: the historic hotels, the Palazzo del Cinema, the Casino, the orderly avenues, the beach just beyond the houses. It is an itinerary that asks for neither haste nor grand effects, but attention to proportions, materials, voids and memories. In this distance from the center of Venice, the twentieth century appears more legible: not as nostalgia, but as a landscape still present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u200b\ufeffThe Lido at the Film Festival reveals an urban landscape where holidaying, cinema, and modernity converge beyond the red carpet, showing a nuanced Venice shaped by architecture and everyday life.\ufeff\u200b","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_page_reading_time":"","csco_page_toc_navigation":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_volume":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,1],"tags":[1312,1313,1314,23,58,670,717,1315],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arte-e-cultura-en","category-senza-categoria","tag-architettura-novecento-en","tag-hotel-des-bains-en","tag-hotel-excelsior-en","tag-laguna","tag-lido-di-venezia","tag-lido-di-venezia-en","tag-mostra-del-cinema-en","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.unlockvenice.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/aiep-inline-1673-inline_1.png\")
<\/figure>\nPalazzo del Cinema, Casino and the public twentieth century<\/h2>\n
A walk without the red carpet<\/h2>\n