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Saturday 22 November 2008

Midas touch

Roderick Gilchrist enjoys Venice

It was while Natalia from Torino was applying small sheets of 24ct gold on my crumbling visage at the Hotel Cipriani, during what must be the most expensive facial ever invented to part the pampered and wealthy from their money, that I reflected on the changing of the guard at this venerable Venetian institution.

You will be lucky to get change out of E400 for the gold facial from Natalia, one of the white-coated handmaidens at the hotel’s Casanova Wellness Centre (apparently the old roué used to cavort through the gardens here), which promises to put off the ageing process. Yippee!

If it could do that, it was worth the money. Not that I was paying. This was on the house because I had the uncertain honour of being a guinea pig, a kind of golden guinea pig really, the first one ever to receive this treatment.

Natalia was excited. The strips of gold came out of a little polythene bag and were carefully applied to my forehead, cheeks and chin. What do I look like, Nat?

It’s a bit late in life for me to draw parallels with Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. Anyway I’m the wrong sex. But I hadn’t expected her answer. ‘Tutankhamun,’ she giggled.

I said the idea was to stop me looking old. Tut died 3,300 years ago. I said for E400, given the price of gold, I wanted to keep those 24ct strips. Perhaps Mervyn King would do a deal, but Nat said no they had to be flushed away. This was like lighting cigars with £50 notes, but they probably do that here too.

The gold facial is an innovation of Maurizio Saccani, the Cip’s new general manager. He already has control of the other five-star Orient Express Hotels in Italy: the Caruso, Ravello, the Splendido, Portafino and the Villa San Michele, Florence.

He is a likeable fellow. How could you resist a chap who confesses his secret passion is jazz and he has just paid a fortune to buy a guitar on the internet but is too scared to tell his wife what it cost? Maurizio started here as food and beverage manager 30 years ago. He’s a terrific success story.

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