Giovanni and I were both in Milan for the day, and he asked me to join him for lunch at Bice with a friend of his, Lauren Bacall. The expensive restaurant was quite empty, we drank a good bit, and the conversation ranged from the actress’s favorite New Yorker cartoon to the particulars of life in Venice. Then obliquely, in a stage whisper (for the most part inside my own mildly alcoholized brain), it went on to the mercurial ways of glamour and money, and this was what I continued to think about after we’d said our goodbyes, all the way back to Venice Santa Lucia. The father rabbit, seeing off his son at the station, hands him a small package, saving: “Your mother wanted you to have this for luck. It’s her foot.” That was the cartoon.

As for life in Venice, we got onto the subject when Miss Bacall dreamily recalled the finger sandwiches that used to be served on airplanes in the old days, when transcontinental air travel began to edge out the railways. We quickly established that the nearest thing going today is the tramezzino, and at that point Miss Bacall—I do not chide her, its just the way people think—added, blithely, “at Harry’s Bar.” Now, the truth is that the tramezzino is as fundamentally Venetian as pizza is Neapolitan, with the consequence that every bar in town makes a sandwich at least as amazing as what is on offer at the Cipriani establishment—and for one tenth of the price. The tuna-and-tomato at the Rosa Salva in Campo S. Luca, for instance, is a minor masterpiece that stems from the same creative source as the comedy of Carlo Goldoni and the music of Benedetto Marcello.

“NO-O-O!?” said Miss Bacall, as if I had just told her that money grows on trees in Giovanni’s garden on the Giudecca.

As I say, it’s just the way people think. A person has certain clusters of associations in his head, and much of what he sees—even when he sees it with his very own eyes—tends to cling like wet snow to this or that existing nucleus, rather than conglobe afresh, spontaneously and capriciously. It is as though there is a snowman of sensibilities being made inside the brain, complete with coals for eyes and a carrot nose, and the more one witnesses and experiences, the bigger the snowman gets, without ever changing its recognizable contours. So in Miss Bacall’s case, for example, the glamour of a flight to Los Angeles, in the days of her youth, adheres more easily to the waiters’ jackets and starched tablecloths at Harry’s Bar than to the greater Venice of unwashed tourist masses and the cheap cafés that presumably cater to them.

Consider the notion which I am tempted to regard in political terms: fresh orange juice. (If the idea of a great fivecent cigar, or a chicken in every pot, or Scotch whiskey on every secret-police chiefs table can gain acceptance as a political symbol, I fail to see why my example should seem frivolous.) Italy is the only place in the world where asking for a glass of fresh orange juice—at any restaurant or bar, anywhere in Italy, at any time of day—means being given what has just been squeezed into the glass with the contractual aim of filling it, at room temperature, with the juice of fresh oranges. In England or the United States, by contrast, this notion—encompassing though it does a technologically uncomplicated process, squeezing, and a widely available commodity, oranges—belongs to the billionaire world of private jets, of terraces overlooking the ocean, of butlers, mistresses, and scandalous love triangles. Yet even the Hello! ambiance is no guarantee. An American billionaire I once stayed with in Beverly Hills, in a house poised above the cascading tiers of a vast orange grove, drank orange juice made from frozen concentrate.

The point is that, in Italy people do not think less of the luxuries that cost little. Alistair McAlpine, an acquaintance of mine in Venice who has amassed world-class collections of everything from antique beads to farm machinery, once told me that, while the tiger cowrie mollusk has the most beautiful shell in the world, it is the far-less-splendid shell of the Cypraea moneta that circulated as a currency among the primitive peoples of the Pacific. Imagine selling a magnificent specimen of the Cypraea tigris for a handful of those dull cowrie shells, or swapping a bag of oranges for a can of concentrate, or gold for paper! How paradoxical; and yet, knowing that the perversity of man is only matched by his credulity, how utterly plausible.

It seems to me that, so long as the Italians continue to treat luxury as a specimen in a vast and serious collection illustrating the morphological diversity of life, they will not be overrun by money as other nations have been. Because money not only is not the key, it is often a barrier to luxury; witness the story of an Italian friend who went to stay at the Cala di Volpe in Sardinia, now owned by an American hotel chain and catering to those who, as the shrewd Arabic saying goes, “do not know the taste of their mouth.” In the sumptuously appointed lobby, there is a long bar, dotted here and there with cash registers. These emit a distinctive whirring sound when operated (which they nearly always are), and this sound, my friend averred, is as quickly rooted in the hotel guest’s consciousness as Pavlov’s bell is in the salivation of the experimental dog.

“I want a drink”—”Here you are, sir”—PFRRRR, $49.50—”I want a boat for the day”—”The boat is waiting, sir”—PFRRRRRR, $6,905.00—”I want a woman for the evening”—”Eccoci qua, Signore, la bella Svetlana!“—PFRRRRR, $3,999.95—and so on, until checkout time. On his first night in his room, as he was luxuriating in his grandiose, canopied bed, it occurred to him to turn over and luxuriate on his side, but then—PFRRR!—he decided against it. He stayed put, flat on his back. “I swear to you,” said my friend, “it was demonic. The very instant the desire to turn over took hold of me, straight away I could hear the whirring.”

Let me restate my case. A terrible conundrum of our bourgeois civilization is whether money can buy happiness. I think it cannot be solved in one go, just as an advanced theorem of geometry cannot be proved by a pupil unfamiliar with the basic principles of Euclidean reasoning. An intermediate question to ponder, in this case, is whether money can buy ordinary comfort, such as the psychological freedom to turn in your bed any which way you please. The answer is: not always. A more advanced question is whether money can buy luxury, glamour, splendor; and here I point to Italy which—quietly but stubbornly—whispers, “no.”

Brescia, then Verona, sped by, then Padua. I kept looking out the window of my train, a grimy InterCity originating in Zurich, thinking how odd it was that nobody at Bice made a fuss over my iconic vis-à-vis, that no woman came over squealing some Italian equivalent of “Oh, Miss Bacall, I just wanted to say, I saw you at the Academy Awards, and I’m so happy, my daughter was doing a lot of acting at Princeton last year, and I just wanted to say, I hope you don’t mind my coming up like this, I think you’re great, just great, and . . . ” In 1867, on his way from Milan to Venice, Mark Twain recorded passing through the same old towns, wedded to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly unaware that the world turns round! And perfectly indifferent, too, as to whether it turns around or stands still. They have nothing to do but eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a friend to stand by and keep them awake. They are not paid for thinking—they are not paid to fret about the world’s concerns.

And yet, he concluded with unconcealed envy, “in their breasts, all their stupid lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding! How can men, calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy?”

The answer, as I say, is in the Italian attitude to life’s luxuries that is still in evidence today, the degraded and happy attitude that—at least in the green backwater of Venice for which I was headed—still resists the global Pavlovian training intended to link glamour with money. A wisely and freshly made sandwich, however cheap, is a greater luxury than a foolishly cut suit of clothes, however fancy the designer; freshly squeezed juice is the best thing to be had at breakfast, whether or not it is associated with swimming pools and movie stars; and a homecooked Sunday lunch for 20, all cousins and aunts from as far afield as Treviso and Padua, is more glamorous than the veal escalope at Bice, however famous my luncheon companion and whether the world turns round.

It was a long, long ride. But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we were—subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a conversational storm—someone shouted: “VENICE!”

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowning in a golden mist of sunset.