I walked down to the Venetian early because I hadn’t seen it yet and wanted time to look around. I’ve never been to Venice, or to Europe for that matter, and I guess the entrance was supposed to represent St. Mark’s Square, or at least that’s what I thought St. Mark’s Square would look like from the pictures I had seen. There was a bridge to go over and you were inside, looking at the casino, nice and handy but nothing to take your breath away, if you’ve seen one casino you’ve seen them all, you go there to gamble, not look around, so I went upstairs. That was more like it. The ceiling was high and painted with clouds, lighted so that you would swear you were outdoors, and underneath the sky there was a canal with gondoliers singing in Italian as they poled their passengers along, under bridges which crossed back and forth to shops and restaurants. A wedding was taking place on one of the bridges and there were happy strollers everywhere. I walked along the canal looking into the shops, reading the menus outside the restaurants like any other tourist and looking at the white medieval statues, which were live and would move every now and then to give you a start.

Canaletto was at the end of the canal across a bridge filled with picture-takers and looked out on a large piazza surrounded by shops. It was seven o’clock and I stood at the entrance to a courtyard filled with tables, taking in the scene, waiting for Sally to arrive fashionably late, when I saw her waving to me from a table next to the railing, ringside on the piazza. People were streaming by in back of her and you would swear she was outside at a sidewalk table in Rome or Florence or Milan, not inside a Vegas hotel with air-conditioning.