What other city is more suited for experiencing ultimate love than the beguiling Venice, the cunning sylph with two faces?

Driven by an unprecedented longing to travel, to escape for a while from the troubles and worries of the art he serves with blind devotion and unwavering persistence, the middle-aged writer Gustav von Aschenbach, the embodiment of the Apollonian European spirit, finds himself ensnared in the web of his forbidden love for a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy.

He succumbs to the frenzied madness of the "foreign god," who violently breaks down his resistance, sweeping everything away and annihilating his entire virtuous and structured existence, leaving the spiritual edifice of his life collapsed in ruins.

With Charon himself as his gondolier and companion, in search of eternal beauty, with cholera crawling unhindered through the dirty alleys of the city and the corrupt local authorities covering up and concealing the epidemic, the love-stricken man allows the gentle soul-guide with the pallid face to accompany him on his Acheronian journey.

He opens the gates of infinity for him, revealing a world full of fiery promises.