Sometimes, though not very often, one has the occasion to discover that, deep down beneath the surface, things are actually better than they seem. Some years ago, when she was unequivocally and irresponsibly young, my English friend Natasha G— came to stay with her godfather, Franco Zeffirelli, at his villa in Positano, where a newly famous Russian called Misha Baryshnikov was also a houseguest. With her godfather’s blessing in loco parentis, Misha started inviting die teenage daughter of a peer of the realm to nightclubs and discotheques, and eventually fell madly in love with her. Recently, I asked Natasha why she had so cruelly broken the openly heterosexual heart of the Nijinsky of our epoch. “Well, you see,” she remembered with visible distaste, “he kept asking me out, and I just hated the way he danced. It was really embarrassing.”

The moral of the story will arrive later. Though I write this crouching behind a hotel-room desk in Rome on what feels like a warm spring afternoon, with the Forum’s white marble bones showing through the open window like the bleached skeleton of some unlamented casualty of social evolution, my mind keeps turning back to Cortina, with all that rude good health, sparkling with snow and brimming with mulled wine. I have just come back, after two weeks of pretending to ski alongside the Romans who make this Alpine village what it is: a wintertime watering hole for those apparently uncomplicated individuals who believe that social evolution is not something to worry about when one can drip with diamonds, swathe yourself in furs, and eat veal cutlets with fresh artichokes in the bar of the Hotel de la Poste instead. In short, modern Romans, not unlike their ancient ancestors who sold prized specimens of hog outside my hotel window, like to enjoy themselves. This they do in Cortina.

From the perspective of Venice, which is only an hour and a half away by car, Cortina belongs to Rome the way Aspen belongs to New York, the City of London belongs to Wall Street, and art belongs to the Muses. Venetians see the place as a playground of the great Roman cafone—a boor, bounder, lout, arriviste, and cad, a cross between Shakespeare’s Falstaff and a New Russian, with a chromosomal admixture of the Essex Man and a genetic pinch of the Bridge and Tunnel. “God, those clowns!” my friend Giovanni exclaims, with a smile bitter as wormwood. “You should watch them eat. How they eat! Like marathon swimmers, face to the right. Ha-a-a-rgh! Then face to the left. Ha-a-a-rgh! And then you see them coming up for air.” His portrayal is accurate, and in the aforementioned bar of the Poste, one can still watch live the orgiastic scenes I remember witnessing in places such as Al Moro, not far from the Quirinale, in the days before Rome started to persecute its crooks as hypocritically as it had once persecuted its Christians.

Outside the habitat he has colonized, such as Cortina in winter and the Costa Smeralda in summer, the cafone sticks out like a sore thumb. A few months ago, I went to the Palafenice—the temporary structure at Tronclietto meant to stand in for Venice’s old Gran Teatro La Fenice until all the money for its reconstruction has been stolen—to hear Angela Brown in Verdi’s Requiem:

Libera me, Domine, de morte
aeterna,

in the ilia tremenda,

quando caeli movendi sunt et
terra . . .

When the performance was over, and the audience started leaving the theater, we saw that Venice had flooded. As though conjured up by the music, aqua aha had come in on cue, and getting home—at any rate without rubber boots up to your ears—was out of the question until the water receded. How long this would take—30 minutes or three hours—was anyone’s guess. Standing next to me in the crowd was a Roman couple, instantly recognizable by the Hermes orange of his scarf and the purple mink of her coat, who would surely have brought to any mind more socially restive than mine the lush English expression “pigs in clover.” And the sow—I mean, the woman—was furious. “How long is this going to take?” she kept asking. As I say, nobody knew the answer. Finally, as her exasperation reached a climax, she shrieked with a fury surpassing the Dies irae we had just heard: “Somebody, please call Rome!” As you or I might have said, in slightly different circumstances: “Switchboard, put me through to Lubyanka!”

This, then, is the ugly side of holidaying in Cortina, at least from the Venetian point of view. But as the story of my princess and the frog with whom she refused to dance illustrates, the moral nexus between repulsive appearance and charming essence is knotted the Gordius way even in children’s fairy tales, hi real life, one must try to dig ever deeper, and when I go to Cortina, as I have now done for about ten Christmases running, I go with die intention of watching the Romans do what they no longer can in Rome, and of admiring them.

Consider the dynamics of social interaction—ideally, from the expensive vantage point of the open-air terrace of the Poste, dry martinis $15, olives included—between old acquaintances. These can really only be described with recourse to a furrier’s specialist terminology, and I know that nobody is going to believe me, but if a 50-year-old woman is wearing a three-quarter-length Canadian sable by Ferre, then the friend she happens to bump into on the terrace will be wearing a coat of the same fur and of the same length. So if it’s chinchilla worked in asymmetrical swirls, then chinchilla worked in asymmetrical swirls it’s going to be—just have a drink, wait for a couple of minutes, pop a green olive in your mouth . . . Well, what’d I tell you? There’s her friend, coming round the corner in white apres-ski boots with CHANEL on them. Chinchilla! Asymmetrical swirls!

“Ciao cara, you always look wonderful in that.” “Hello darling, and you in that.” Come to think of it, the people here don’t have friends; they have mirror reflections. They don’t have thoughts and conversations; they have furriers and jewelers. But now, just before the second martini, is the time to ask: Is that bad? Is it really better to conform to the global rule of “be yourself and “be what you want to be,” which, of course, has been promulgated in order to ensure maximum homogeneity the world over, a homogeneity of militant pseudo-individualism veiling all classes and conditions of men with a denim pall, or is it better to rebel as the people in this alpine oasis do, to live like a cafone among the cafoni, to be with your own kind, to move in the company of your own ethical and aesthetic doubles, and feel no shame?

They tremble at the thought of wearing furs in Aspen. In New York, they buy fake pearls from Kenneth Lane. Nobody in St. Tropez remembers how a dry martini is mixed. Does this make their social twins any less identical? Does it make their lives less predictable, more introspective, more subtle? Do we really suppose that the German woman in a nylon parka with fake fur trim talking to her friend in jeans and a sheepskin vest about the political situation in the Middle East—and not even once addressing her as “darling”—is any less of a fake bitch, and would have any more interesting things to say, than the splendid Roman cafona now traversing the field of vision in front of my table? Waiter, I’ll have another. I want to toast the magnificent conformity of this stubborn microcosm of yours.

And again I return to the story of my friend and her putative lover. Had the world’s greatest dancer possessed but the smallest share of the rebellious stubbornness of these Romans in Cortina, he would have taken her to the ballet instead. Natasha Baryshnikova! Now, that has a ring to it. I think I shall send her a postcard.