An ageing composer comes to Venice for his regular stay. A family with a boy named Tadzio stay in the same hotel, and the boy becomes an object of pure beauty for the composer who, until then, had found beauty mostly in music. Just as the city conceals a cholera epidemic, the elderly protagonist conceals his love. Eros and Thanatos have never been so close. This adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel with Gustav Mahler's beautiful music is one of the supreme works of the master of Italian cinema, Luchino Visconti.