Ian Osborne

Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, or take the vaporetto to see Palladio’s astonishing church. But it’s harder to sneak inside the doors of the monastery in San Giorgio, one of the city’s 118 islands. It is now home to Fondazione Giorgio Cini, a cultural institution and retreat sufficiently magnificent and isolated to have hosted the G7 meetings of 1980 and 1987. Last week it hosted the Alpine Fellowship, a gathering of philosophers, artists, writers and musicians. This year tackled the question of self-expression in the age of instant communication.

Election night in Paris is a very different affair from our own, rather sober ritual, for which the nation looks to a reassuring David Dimbleby. To begin with, the night is over when the exit polls are published the moment the polls close at 8p.m. All the major candidates compete to address the live television audiences immediately, and before any actual results have been certified. ••• Meanwhile, the news networks appear not to have discovered the Skycopter™, so the journey from candidates’ residences to victory parties (or otherwise) is a bizarre ritual where young overexcited reporters perched on the back of motorbikes chase the motorcades, defying death with late-night chases, trying valiantly to penetrate blacked-out windows as they speed through Paris.