Venice vs. Vegas

(2000)

Las Vegas is one of the most peculiar cities in the world but apparently that’s not enough. Las Vegas has decided to become all the world’s other peculiar cities, too.

The gambling capital already has Paris Las Vegas and New York New York. In the Nevada version of the City of Lights, waiters never mock you for ordering in the local lingo. If something smells like a smoldering Doberman, you can safely call the fire department; it’s not an existentialist smoking a Gauloise. And at New York New York you experience a wonderful, heartwarming phenomenon that the native Gothamite will never know: parking.

So far so good with the urban impersonators on the Strip. Although one might prefer that the cities chosen were cities that really needed replacing, not to mention roulette and girlie shows. I suggest Dayton Ohio Las Vegas and Tehran Tehran.

But now there’s something much more ambitious in the middle of the desert—Venice. A fellow named Sheldon Adelson has built The Venetian resort and casino. And according to its brochure, when Adelson announced his plans for The Venetian, he said, “We’re not going to build a ‘faux’ Venice. We’re going to build what is essentially the real Venice.”

Anyone who can make a bagel and a lot of noise can create a convincing New York. And Paris as we know it today is mostly a recent fabrication. It’s the product of urban renewal in the 1870s when the French government undertook an innovative program of slum clearance by killing all the members of the Paris Commune. But Venice is another matter—heir to Byzantium, progenitor of Marco Polo, patron of Titian, and inspiration to Lord Byron, who And they should get that wingèd lion treated, because marble piles sound very painful.

Look’d to the wingèd Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV, stanza I

Anyway, there is a mystery to Venice, a soul, an essence—quite a strong essence on a hot August day when the tide is low in the Adriatic. Phew!

When I met Sheldon Adelson at The Venetian I told him, “You didn’t get the smell right.”

“Can’t do everything,” he said. Although he certainly has tried. Pulling into the Ducal Palace’s driveway, you can see St. Mark’s Square, the clock tower with its clockwork Moors, the twin columns topped by St. Theodore and the wingèd lion of St. Mark that needs Preparation H, the Campanile, the Sansoviniana Library, the Ca’ d’Oro palace, the Bridge of Sighs, and the Rialto. This is a lot more than you can see from the original Ducal Palace’s driveway, especially since it doesn’t have one.

Considering the desiccated landscape around Las Vegas, a city with an average rainfall of 4.2 inches a year, I would have thought Sheldon Adelson faced a major obstacle to building “the real Venice.” After all, what was the main physical feature causing Venice to be Venice? Barbarians, as it turns out. Venice is built on a mud bank in the middle of a lagoon and is up to its Venetian blinds in water—because of barbarians. Attila the Hun chased the Italians out there in AD 453. So Sheldon Adelson was in luck. Las Vegas is filled with barbarians, particularly the kind who wear black socks and sandals and T-shirts and shorts to restaurants at night and leave their baseball caps on during dinner.

What is it with Americans? America’s malls are full of clothing stores. America does almost nothing but shop. Then why are Americans dressed like my three-year-old daughter when she’s allowed to choose her own clothes? Except Americans are much fatter. Italians don’t look like this. You don’t catch Italians going into the Basilica di San Marco in flip-flops and a halter top with extra butt hanging out of their Speedos. But I digress. Venice vs. The Venetian. Is Venice as romantic as I remember it being, after nine Bellinis at Harry’s Bar? Will video poker ever inspire a novella by Thomas Mann? Would it be easier to read than other Thomas Mann stuff?

Now some people might think that Venice vs. The Venetian would be no contest. After all, Venice is the most romantic city on earth. I remember when I was first married—an evening in one of those beautiful mahogany motoscafo water taxis, coming back from Harry’s with my bride to the Excelsior Hotel on Lido Beach …

It might have been a heck of a night if I hadn’t had nine Bellinis and wound up hanging over the gunwale.

Then there’s the matter of taking one’s wife to Venice at all. Wives will want one of those Murano glass chandeliers that’s the size of a sailing dinghy even though our dining room ceiling is less than eight feet high, and this would leave all the handblown dangling glass chandelier stuff dragging in the butter dish.

Plus there’s the matter of getting a chandelier into the overhead bin on the return flight. Furthermore, Murano chandeliers cost as much as … as much as the water-taxi fare from where the autostrade runs out of dry land to the dock at the Gritti Palace Hotel.

That’s where my wife and I stayed three years later when we drove to Venice (we weren’t thinking that out) with our toddler daughter. And let’s not talk about what the Gritti Palace costs. A phone number. That’s in dollars. The trail of zeros from the Italian lire hotel bill spilled off one receipt page and filled two others.

However, we did have a good time, even though there is practically nowhere in Venice that you can push a stroller without going into the drink or carrying it up and down the stairs on those cute little bridges, Venice being woefully behindhand in Americans with Disabilities Act compliance.

And you can’t take the toddler out of the stroller because Italians are too nonchalant—or too short on tort lawyers—to put guardrails along the canals. Also, the balusters on the cute little bridges are spaced so far apart that toddlers are tempted to run a quarterback draw even on fourth down and ten. The one time we did let go of Muffin’s hand, in the middle of St. Mark’s Square, a Japanese tourist handed the child an open bag of bird feed, and ten thousand filthy pigeons reenacted the climactic ten minutes of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds on our baby daughter’s head. Don’t order squab in Venice—or, come to think of it, for God’s sake, do.

Las Vegas was a very different experience. For one thing, I was alone. And I had a good-sized wad of cash—a financial windfall resulting from my wife’s failure to buy a Murano chandelier. (Hint to husbands wishing to avoid chandelier purchases: When you go to the Murano glass shops take a two-year-old. And turn her loose. This is expensive, but not as expensive as the chandelier. Your wife won’t have time to buy anything anyway because all three of you are going to get the bum’s rush from every glass shop on the island.)

But is The Venetian “essentially the real Venice”? For a Venice that’s on the wrong continent, in the middle of a dust bowl, and was built last year, The Venetian is surprisingly authentic. The Campanile, for instance, is fake, but so’s the one in really real Venice. The original Campanile, completed in 1173, collapsed in a heap in 1902, and a replica was constructed in its place.

The Venetian’s architectural unity is marred by a large, ugly, modern parking garage. Ditto Venice’s. The Autorimessa Comunale is on the Piazza Roma, and getting a space in it is more of a crap shoot than anything in Las Vegas. Then there’s Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan, and Calvin Klein. Are these brands for sale along the Grand Canal in Venice or along the Grand Canal in The Venetian? Both. Plus The Venetian’s Grand Canal is not only indoors, it’s on the second floor. I’d like to see Venice’s famed Renaissance architect Jacopo Sansovino pull that off. Not that I’d let him try. When Sansovino was building his namesake Libreria Sansoviniana in 1545, the roof fell in and Sansovino went to prison for a while. Nevada has too many tort lawyers for Sheldon Adelson to let something like that happen. And Adelson’s Libreria Sansoviniana is not, like Sansovino’s, filled with musty old books that you aren’t allowed to touch. It contains Madame Tussauds Celebrity Encounter. You aren’t allowed to touch things there either, but who’d want to touch a wax Wayne Newton?

However, back to the Grand Canal. The gondolas don’t actually go anyplace in the indoor version, just back and forth. But they don’t actually go anyplace in the outdoor version—just around in circles until your wallet is empty and your head is ringing with a pidgin English rendition of “That’s Amore.” And the American tourists in the Las Vegas gondolas look less uncomfortable than the American tourists in the Venice gondolas because, in Las Vegas, the gondolier isn’t some sneering foreigner in suspiciously tight pants; he’s a nice out-of-work actor or musician who feels just as dumb in the gondola as you do. Furthermore, the water in the Las Vegas Grand Canal is clean, chlorinated, and shallow. And if you do fall in, so what? There are enough coins on the bottom to play the slots for hours.

Most of the things that aren’t authentic about The Venetian’s Venice are, like the smell, an improvement. The ten thousand filthy pigeons of St. Mark’s Square have been replaced with fifty trained white doves that are released for a brief flyby, on the hour, from 1 to 4 p.m. In the Grand Canal food court you can get—as opposed to authentic octopus in its own ink—pastrami with mustard on rye.

The suite we had at the Gritti Palace was half the size of the single I stayed in at The Venetian. The Venetian’s room decor was not equal to the gilded ceiling mirror and ormolu bidet rococo of the Gritti, but I didn’t mind. And I would have minded even less if I’d had, as we did in Italy, a two-year-old girl along. The walls of our rooms at the Gritti were covered with paintings of the very naked mythological type. “Where their clothes go, Daddy? What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” And the Las Vegas Rialto Bridge has—bless those tort lawyers again—metal bars between the balusters to keep toddlers from getting a first down in the clean, chlorinated lagoon.

Las Vegas gambling is a terribly vulgar affair, of course. I certainly thought so after losing all my Murano savings at blackjack. But maybe some better-bred, more white-shoe sort of games of chance could be developed to suit the refined taste of those who appreciate nine Bellinis at Harry’s Bar. Sending the children to Brown and betting that they don’t become communists is a possibility, as is marrying chorus girls without getting prenuptial agreements.

And the entertainment at The Venetian C2K nightclub wasn’t very good. A “tribute show” featured some guy who did pop music impressions, including all the stages of the Elvis career. But it could have been worse. An Italian doing impressions might have run through all the popes.

So our next European vacation is going to be spent in the Mojave. And yet … and yet … there’s something about the damp, smelly, expensive Venice of old. Maybe it’s the gleam in my wife’s eye (although I suspect that’s the Murano chandelier), or maybe it’s the thought of what Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Las Vegas would be like.

Act I, Scene III

SHYLOCK TO ANTONIO: If you repay me not on such a day,

In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh….

Enter “Porsche,” scantily dressed.

A pound of flesh? Here’s a hundred and sixteen pounds!
With a pair of D-cups! And get a load of these gams!