Vexed in Venice

Bar hopping with a bunch of gondoliers at Christmas wasn't Joan Juliet Buck's style.

When I peered over the Gothic staircase at dawn on my fourth day in Venice to see that the lobby of the Hotel Danieli was under 14 inches of water, I sent up thanks for my very first acqua alta. It meant the bar was out of commission. The bar's armchairs, stools and tables were already stacked all the way up the staircase. Our tribe began each day in the bar at 10: Peter O'Toole; his wife, Sian Phillips; her mother, known to all as Mumgee; their daughters Kate and Pat with their nanny Elizabeth; two writers in love, Harry Craig and Shana Alexander; and Joyce and Jules Buck, my parents. They and the O'Tooles had a movie company called Keep Films, and they were as inseparable in play as in work.

The acqua alta receded. Just before noon the furniture was back in the bar, and, sitting with their shoes planted on wet oriental carpets, so were the beaming grown-ups. The kids, the nanny and I held back. Wasn't it kind of chilly down here? I sneezed to make my point. Kate, who was 10, was happy: she'd been allowed to walk along the concierge's desk while the water was still high. I'd gone back to bed and missed the fun.

Peter and Sian's Venetian friends arrived, working-class stars of the tourist industry resting between summers: the Danieli's off-duty barman, Gastone de Cal; his pal the gondolier Gino Macropodio; their wives, parents, children and friends. There was a painter who made convincing Guardi oils, which, he swore, he never sold as the real thing. There was an aged gentleman called the Cavaliere, who was writing a cookbook about Venetian food with an exile from American wealth named Buzz Bruning, who had met his young wife, Leslie, as she chaperoned Finch College students through Italy. They lived in a house in the Sestiere di San Polo, where Buzz often cooked for the barman, the gondoliers, the Cavaliere and their families; that Christmas, he was preparing a bigger feast to include the 11 members of the Buck-O'Toole-Craig-Alexander party.

The group was some 20 strong by the time we hit the cold wind on the Riva degli Schiavoni, skirted the Doge's palace and headed into the back streets with a single mission: to stand at the counters of small Venetian bars and knock back little glasses of red wine called ombrette and eat little fried and breaded things called cicchete, and then walk up and down bridges and through the gray streets to the next bar, and the next, until lunchtime, which would happen at about 3 p.m. and be an exact replica of what came before, only this time seated and with larger portions of fish.