Greedy guests at hotel breakfast buffets are hard to stomach, says Alan Bennett

WITH its celebrated art, architecture and maze of canals, there is plenty to whet the cultural appetite of the tourists who flock to Venice every year.

But for Alan Bennett, ever the wry observer and keen chronicler of the ways in which standards have dropped, how fellow hotel guests tackled the breakfast buffet was among the more arresting sights.

The playwright and author, 82, wrote in his diary: ‘The greed at breakfast in our hotel is also dispiriting, one young woman this morning with such a passion for fruit that she piles her plate with melon, pineapple, grapes and kiwi fruit and fills her pockets with tangerines to the extent that in the process nature itself is demeaned.

‘Hard to be a waitress at breakfast and retain a respect for one’s fellows.

‘Some of the well-to-do guests can’t wait to get the food back from the breakfast bar to their table, one young man downing a tumbler of orange juice en route and a boy stuffing himself with sausages before he even sits down.’

The typically waspish aside is among several Bennett made during a four-day visit to the Italian city with his partner of 24 years, 50-year-old Rupert Thomas, who is the editor of the World of Interiors magazine, in November.

While admiring the masterpieces by the Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio in the historic Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Bennett observed: ‘Other visitors arrive, photographing the pictures almost before looking at them.’

By contrast, he is ‘grateful’ for the Italians’ ‘grace and good temper’ as he sits down for a rest on a bench, and also for their friendliness – ‘virtues on which we have so summarily turned our backs,’ he writes in another of the new diary entries, published in the latest edition of the London Review of Books.

An outing to the Museo Correr in St Mark’s Square prompts him to note that it has been reorganised so that the paintings which he had considered its ‘chief delight’ have ‘migrated upstairs somewhere’ and he cannot find them.

Bennett, who is perhaps best known for his Talking Heads monologues in 1988 and his play The History Boys, which was later made into a film, gives an equally wry account of an evening out at a restaurant.

Having taken a water taxi there, he finds there is a three or four foot gap between the swaying boat and the landing stage. ‘I launch myself into space, with time enough as I’m flying through the air to wonder with a bad ankle and at 82 how I’m going to manage,’ he wrote. ‘But it’s ok.’

But whether the jump was worth it is not quite clear, however, as he added: ‘We have a nice meal though Italian food isn’t quite the same as it was.

‘In the 1970s I invariably ate Parma ham and melon followed by liver and sage, neither of them on the menu tonight.’

Bennett, whose previous diary volumes have been best-sellers, wrote these new entries after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, which he said he deplores, and the election of ‘vulgarian’ Donald Trump as US President.

‘Note how melancholy most of these Venetian entries are and not merely because of Trump and Co,’ Bennett writes.

‘Venice, however ravishing, is ultimately a sad place.’

‘Nature itself is demeaned’