Arriving in the Venetian archipelago is no hardship - especially if you're staying at the Cipriani. A mahogany launch greets you at Marco Polo airport on the mainland for the 40-minute glide across the most famous lagoon in the world. The pilot looks like Montgomery Clift as imagined by Caravaggio, with a beauty mark that makes Elizabeth Taylor's seem insipid. Among your fellow passengers is a silky Omar Sharif type and his bodacious girlfriend, who's 19 if she's a day. The cabin has white frills at the windows and buttoned banquettes in that wonderfully bilious shade of green beloved by the doges.
Nobody thinks so.
In a place that welcomes more than 10 million visitors every year, this is no small consideration. Guests retreat to the Cipriani's voluptuously scented gardens and Olympic-sized saltwater pool, as well as three restaurants and as many bars, features that make it more of a resort than a hotel. If Venice drowned tomorrow, I am quite sure people would still go to the Cipriani. The Ravolta Carmignani linen sheets were cuddly from years of laundering, though having the bed face away from the water is one of the great missed opportunities in the annals of hotel design. But I will never be able to get my head around rectangular toilet seats.