When in Venice.(The Talk of the Town)(Column)

Dear Miss Manners,

Not to be rude, but enough already with the finger bowls and no-white-shoes-after-Labor Day. Shouldn't a proper conversationalist change the subject every few decades?

In the hope of saving Miss Manners from excruciatingly incorrect interrogation, a lunch companion recently intercepted this horrid little note and rephrased the question: How does Miss Manners like to take her leisure? Miss Manners (nom de off time: Judith Martin) replied that she had recently written a history of Venice entitled "No Vulgar Hotel," with apologies to Henry James, whose heroine Milly Theale asserted the importance, when touring La Serenissima, of finding "some fine old rooms, wholly independent . . . but inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves, with a cook."

Miss Manners's Venetophilia was first stoked on a family trip when she was fourteen, despite an un-Jamesian stay at the Pensione Isak Dinesen, remembered, fifty-five years later, primarily for its oil soup. Miss Manners began her column in 1978, partly in response to the longtime penchant of subscribers to the Washington Post for telephoning the paper with such queries as "When can I wear my silver fox fur?" (Whenever you want, provided there's a chill in the air.) She obsesses over Italy as much as she does etiquette, visiting (her term is "keeping house") for two-week stints in rented accommodations three or four times a year, or whenever her day job allows. "When I see the skyline, my heart lifts," she said.

Dear Lunch Companion of Miss Manners,

Ask her what's so great about Venice.

This query, put to Miss Manners under the lemon-yellow awnings of Downtown Cipriani, in Manhattan, elicited both stern and rapturous disquisition. But not before she placed an order for beef carpaccio, Cipriani's handling of which Miss Manners found woefully tailored to American ignorance: "One sees carpaccio now--Harry's invented it--on menus all over, and it's not the same thing. Did you notice that the waiter felt obliged to explain that it has the mayonnaise sauce? I wouldn't think anything else!"