Diary of a boor at La Fenice in Venice, featuring attacks on waiters and a touch of shame

The other evening at the Lido, the Campari party was held in their lounge with a terrace, right opposite the Palazzo del Cinema. Special guest Dardust was on the decks, putting on a great show. There were queues stretching for kilometres all the way to Chioggia; the party was literally stormed – it felt like Ceuta, but with everyone looking their best. Will the government suspend Schengen for us too when we return from Venice? To cope with the huge demand, the bar had whittled the drinks list down to three options (spritz, Americano or Negroni); and once everyone had their drink in hand, people began to wander back and forth between the bar and the terrace. There was music, but no room to dance; people looked at one another, chatted, and at most brushed past each other – but only to get through. Among the crowd are Brooke from The Bold and the Beautiful (I recognise her straight away, even though she wasn’t hooking up with anyone), Rocío Muñoz Morales, Alessandro Borghi, and a bloke who looks like Ken from Barbie but half his height and with a sluggish metabolism, taking selfies with his camera. There are loads of guests, and even more cameras filming them: we’ll all end up in a Campari advert. Speaking of promotion: the following evening saw the Ferragamo cocktail party, but this one was in Venice, at none other than La Fenice. The occasion was the screening of the short film “Un passo alla volta”: fifteen minutes of glossy cinema to promote the history of the famous brand as well as the acting career of the founder’s granddaughter, Martina.

The short film is a sort of “Back to the Future”, but with shoes instead of the DeLorean. The short film is, well, short; the talk that follows is, objectively speaking, long. However, the issue is the air conditioning: even in the La Fenice auditorium where the screening is taking place, the temperatures are freezing; it feels like being on a Frecciarossa (notoriously one of the coldest places in Italy, worse than Campobasso in winter); but I can guess why: many of the guests are here (also? only?) to model items from Ferragamo’s new autumn-winter collection. In other words: there are women here tonight dressed in woollen garments. It is for them that we mere mortals, dressed as normal people do in early September of the hottest year on record, are shivering in the auditorium. And one suspects that when people clap at the end of the event, it is partly to warm themselves up. Afterwards, refreshments are served in the theatre foyer. At the bar, skilled hands are mixing cocktails, whilst waiters pass round top-class finger food – I’d even go so far as to call it savoury pastries. The short film must have whetted the audience’s appetite, because the trays barely have time to leave the door (which evidently leads to the kitchens or something similar) before they’re immediately emptied, with the result that the food never makes it to the back of the room; even the less quick-witted guests do not take long to realise what the problem is, and before long the party centres entirely around the aforementioned door, piling on the waiters as soon as they emerge, as if they were stagecoaches in the Old West.

I admit that, like everyone else, I jostled my way through those doors to secure a plate of risotto (it was excellent, with orange zest); and as I devoured it, I felt like a boor, a vandal of the La Fenice institution that was hosting us, just a notch above those who, in the recent past, set it alight. Conscious of my working-class hunger in such an exclusive setting, I make my way home through the Venetian streets with my tie dangling between my legs.