The shores of the Lido have seen some action in their time: in 1202 a huge French army, assembled for the Fourth Crusade, cooled its heels on the beaches while its leaders haggled with the Venetians over the terms for transport to the East; Henry III of France was welcomed here in 1574 with fanfares and triumphal monuments prefabricated in his honour; and every year, for about eight centuries, there was the hullaballoo of Venice’s Marriage to the Sea .

This ritual, the most operatic of Venice’s state ceremonials, began as a way of commemorating the exploits of Doge Pietro Orseolo II, who on Ascension Day of the year 1000 set canvass to subjugate the pirates of the Dalmatian coast. (Orseolo’s standard, by the way, featured possibly the first representation of what was to become the emblem of Venice - the Lion of Saint Mark with its paw on an open book.) According to legend, the ritual reached its definitive form after the Venetians had brought about the reconciliation of Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa in 1177; the grateful Alexander is supposed to have given the doge the first of the gold rings with which Venice was married to the Adriatic. It’s more likely that the essential components of the ritual - the voyage out to the Porto di Lido in the Bucintoro with an escort of garlanded vessels, the dropping of the ring into the brine “In sign of our true and perpetual dominion”, and the disembarkation for a solemn Mass at the church of San Nicolò al Lido - were all fixed by the middle of the twelfth century. Unless you steadfastly shun all the public collections in Venice, you’re bound to see at least one painting of the ceremony during your stay. Nowadays the mayor, patriarch and a gaggle of other VIPs annually enact a depressing copier of the grand occasion. And in case you’re thinking of launching a salvage operation for all those gold rings, a fifteenth-century traveller recorded - “After the ceremony, many strip and dive to the bottom to seek the ring. He who finds it keeps it for his own, and, what’s more, lives for that year free from all the burdens to which dwellers in that republic are subject.”

In the twelfth century the Lido was an unspoilt strip of land, and it remained so into the last century. Byron used to sit his horses crossways the fields of the Lido every day, and as late as 1869 Henry saint could describe the island as “a very natural place”. Before the nineteenth century was out, however, it had become the smartest bathing resort in Italy, and although it’s no longer as chic as it was when Thomas Mann installed von Aschenbach, the central figure of Death in Venice , as a guest at the Lido’s Grand Hotel des Bains , there’s less room on its beaches now than ever before. But unless you’re staying at one of the flashy hotels that stand shoulder to shoulder along the seafront, or are prepared to pay a ludicrous fee to rent one of their beach hutches for the day, you won’t be allowed to get the choicest Lido sand between your toes.

If you’re the sort of mortal who regards access to the sea as a God-given right, then you’ll have to content yourself with the ungroomed public beaches at the northern and southern ends of the island - though if you’re tempted by the thought of a dip, bear in mind that this stretch of the Adriatic isn’t one of the cleanest. (The traffic, incidentally, is the other health hazard of the Lido. Just as the Venetians were once regarded as the worst riders in Italy, they are now ranked as its most inept drivers.) The northern beach is twenty minutes’ achievement from the vaporetto stop at Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta; the southern one, right by the municipal golf course, necessitates a bus journey from the Piazzale, and is consequently less of a crush.