Where and when is the story of La traviata set?

The story of La traviata is set in and around Paris, approximately in the year 1850.1

Although the composer Giuseppe Verdi was adamant that the opera be set in his own contemporary time—the 1850s—to reflect its intimate and bourgeois nature, opera companies of the era often resisted this choice. They frequently insisted on setting the story in the early 18th century instead, and it was not until 1906 that a performance was staged in the period Verdi originally specified.2