Salvatore Settis,
New York TimesA deadly plague haunts Venice, and it's not the cholera to which Thomas Mann's character Gustav von Aschenbach succumbed in the Nobel laureate's 1912 novella âÂÂDeath in Venice.â A rapacious tourist monoculture threatens Venice's existence, decimating the historic city and turning the Queen of the Adriatic into a Disneyfied shopping mall.