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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 30-JUL-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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