Gustave Aschenbach, renowned German scholar and historian, reaches a crisis in his previously austere and celibate life. Exhausted from the pressures and the seemingly sterile quality of his aesthetic endeavors, he seeks respite and pleasure. Through a series of misadventures, he eventually arrives in the summer city of Venice, a city he knows and has always longed to visit again.

The reader observes the progressive moral alteration in the rigidly self-controlled man as he succumbs to his long repressed desire to experience the types of passion that art, rather than reason, allows. His transformation extends to the worship of a beautiful young boy--Aschenbach's vision of a doomed Greek god.

As Aschenbach becomes progressively obsessed with his longing, he assumes the role of a lover gone amok. Venice is under siege by a plague, and given the chance to escape--and to warn his object's Polish family of his knowledge about the dangers facing them all--he chooses to take the ultimate risk of death rather than give up his passionate obsession.