There's an old film in which Terry Thomas, the villain of the piece, is trying to woo a rich heiress in a gondola in Venice. She's gazing dreamily not into his eyes, but into those of the somewhat knavish gondolier, when Thomas, writhing with jealousy, shakes her rather roughly and says: "These chappies - they're not sincere, you know."
It often upsets Englishmen that the Italians, while seemingly unhampered by any considerations of honour, tend to do gallant even better than they do.
I've just arrived in Venice, cutting across the bay from the airport by water taxi through the falling night. Now I'm inside Harry's Bar, and I cannot imagine a finer start to an evening. I've got a wad of lire in my pocket and I'm being swept to a table. A Bellini - the cocktail of Prosecco and fresh peach that was invented here, and which everyone in the room is drinking - is only a nod away.
In March this year, Italy's ministry of fine arts and culture declared its intention to make Harry's Bar a national monument. Deservedly so. Harry's is chic but mercifully unritzy. The lineage of its customers runs from Ernest Hemingway through Truman Capote to Jan Morris. There is nothing the waiters wouldn't do for you. One of the stories they like to tell - as well worn as the decor and all the better for it - is that a local nobleman was once piggybacked to his boat to save him getting wet during a flood.
In November this year, Venetian lawyers announced that the owner of the bar, Arrigo Cipriani, would be prosecuted for tax evasion. Italy is riddled with laws that aim to outsmart rodent-brained local businessmen. They never work. It's illegal to leave a bar without a receipt that shows how much money ought to have gone through the till. So, according to the police, what Harry's has been doing is to rubber-stamp its copy of the receipt with the word sconto (discount), write a smaller figure on it and present that to the taxman.
The bar is said to have saved itself half a million pounds in tax. Cipriani, needless to say, denies this.
My Bellini is delicious, not too sweet, tasting of the threads of flesh you lick out of peach stones. It is expensive, though, at 23,000 lire - almost £8.
I feel very chic. I thought the place would be crammed with tourists, but most of the men coming through the door are Italians, snug in their fur-lined parkas or (the older ones) dapper in dark, straight coats, submitting their orders to the silky waiters. The spell is broken when a cluster of smart English people arrives at the table next door. "It just tastes like drinking fruit juice," says the eldest daughter, cut-glass tones ringing out. "And look at the price! Can you get me a glass of water? From the tap."
We move on, and end up in a small bar. Rough-hewn Venetians flit through, sitting in silence at the gambling machines at the back, then yelling "Amore! Tesoro!" for their stumpy wives when they want to leave. Red wine, so murky it might have been slopped first on the cellar floor, comes (via plastic containers) from a huge, straw-clad bottle. No sign of Harry's tasteful decor here. The (very bad) pencil drawing tacked to the wall depicts a Christlike man with a woman's breasts. I decide I'd like to go local, and ask for the drink that I've seen some other customers ordering. I'm not sure what it's called, but Cynar and white wine are definitely involved. I try to do the batting eyelashes thing that the Harry's waiters would understand so well, as I explain this to the barman in my ropy Italian, asking him what this strange cocktail is called.
"That?" he says. "Well, that's Cynar and white wine. You could have a Spritz," he points to a large sign on the bar, "that's a Venetian thing. We put different bitters in according to how sweet your taste is." I order the Spritz with the bitterest bitter. The tumblerful of white wine, Cynar, a dash of soda and a lump of lemon works like an anaesthetic. It costs 2,200 lire - less than £1.
This is where you'd end up if you did run off with a gondolier. On the way home, after three Venetian Spritzes, a canal swerves up in front of me. I am lucky to escape a drenching.
