Former Grande Fratello contestant and Italian personality Francesca Rocco arriving at the film festival.Former Grande Fratello contestant and Italian personality Francesca Rocco arriving at the film festival.

There may be no more breathtaking place than Venice to throw a big party. That must be why, to open the festival, there were two of them – back to back, dripping with glamour, gourmet food and a cocktail made with gold powder.

Francesca Rocco, a personality from Milan, more or less summed up the overall effect of the two bashes by showing up in a white floor-length bridal-style gown, topped by a silver-sequined bodice. She said it was made for her by an Italian designer and had decided it should be called ‘Fabulous’.

That is what she also said it had felt like, walking down the red carpet at the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido beach.

The party was held in two huge, pale white marquis tents erected near the gentle Adriatic waves with candelabra-lit tables to seat 1,000 people for a magnificent banquet.

“It’s wonderful; I am in a fable,” Rocco, attending the event for the first time, said after she’d passed the gauntlet of photographers calling out her name to get her attention.

In the beachside marquis, the hungry hordes were eating their way through a buffet that stretched much of the way around the perimeter of the two tents, with an array of meats, vegetables, fruit, cheeses and tables of desserts, including one where they were displayed as if they were on a wedding cake.

Wine and champagne were also plentiful, which probably was an essential ingredient of what London-based Irish film producer Frank Mannion, seated at a table with an Albanian pop singer, among other guests, said was a kick-off event for “one of the great film festivals”.

This being Venice, the city of endless intrigue, there also probably were some rivalries going on, not least at the level of the two banquets, with another party thrown by trade publication Variety having been held the night before on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Danieli, a stone’s throw from San Marco.

At this party the chefs of four luxury hotels, and their barmen, were challenged to come up with food and drink that somehow reflected the films for which Alexandre Desplat, the French composer who is chairing the main jury at this year’s festival, has scored the music.

For the Middle East action drama Syriana, the barman invented a mix of bourbon, the Italian-made aperitif China Martini, Grand Marnier and gold powder – the latter being, according to a cowboy-hatted server, exactly what it said – a powder mixed with gold.

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