A day in Europe.

A DAY spent in Europe--the possibilities are endless. Where to wake, for instance? I know with absolute certainty where I would wake: in Hampshire, at an English country hotel. The George at Stamford, perhaps; the season would be spring and I would lie in bed with the windows wide open, the curtains drawn back. I would break my sleep with the call of a cockerel echoed by his mates in nearby chicken pens, and then I would listen to the birds as they sang their dawn chorus. Sleep would be gone, and I would stand at my bedroom window, this time in the Hotel Bucintoro just beyond the bridge that spans the canal leading to Venice's Arsenal. I would stand at my open window and look down to the Grand Canal, on my left the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio's masterpiece, on my right the Doges' Palace, ahead the customs building with its golden weather cock--perhaps this is the finest view in the world, certainly the best view in Venice. A sporting man might choose the moors of Scotland or the forests of Germany; perhaps the view of the Jungfrau from the room where Queen Victoria slept in the Palace Hotel at Interlaken.

Breakfast, a tuna-fish sandwich and caffe latte, at Paulo's bar in front of the Arsenal, where four Greek lions guard the Renaissance gateway; or bacon and eggs with black pudding at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, where lawyers and writers take their morning meal. Or perhaps a pair of kippers at the Fox and Anchor on the edge of Smithfield meat market close by Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, kippers washed down with a pint of Black Velvet (Champagne and Guinness), as I sit among butchers in their bloodstained overalls, who eat vast quantities of food and drink pints of beer and measures of whisky turn and turn about. In Paris, perhaps at the Deux Magots, once a toy shop, later a bar, where Picasso and Matisse would have taken their breakfast; after hot coffee and croissants, it's a short walk down the road to the bookseller de Nobel, who sells art books; Paris is a mecca for those who buy books.

For a morning's shopping expedition, let's go to Rome, to Curiosita e Magica, a conjuring shop. The proprietor will amaze you by making your possessions disappear and then reappear again. Apart from the tricks he sells, his shop is filled with his own collection of things that belonged to the world's great magicians. Or to Milan, where, in the Via Monte Napoleone, is the shop of G. Lorenzi, who sells every form of knife--from implements to shave your chin to hatchets to take on hunting trips--and pipes of every size and shape, and all the implements that those who smoke cigars could possibly need. Before lunch I will swim in the sea and visit the ruins of ancient Greece, or take a dry martini in Venice in Florian's Bar-- not sitting in the square listening to the music of their quartet, but sitting on a bar stool in the back room, where Venetians gather and the barman makes a martini that seems so white and pure that it could not possibly do you any harm.

Lunch, where to lunch? Will I go to Bologna, where the food is the best in Italy, or Lyon, where the food is the best in France? Perhaps I will sit by the Thames at Michel Roux's Waterside Inn, where the food is the equal of anyone's. Or the bar of Phoenix, a public house on the edge of Hartley Witney, for a pub lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles washed down by a couple of pints of "Breakspeares" mild beer; a lifetime could be spent tracking down the retailers of Britain's many beers. Then again perhaps I would eat on the terrace of the Hotel Les Baux at Les Baux de Provence, a small hotel that burrows into the curious rock formations that constitute this lookout high above the Camargue. I would sit in the fresh air and eat the leg of baby lamb cooked in pastry. I once stayed there and gambled with the proprietor: if I chose a wine and he did not have it in his cellar, I would drink free that night. I stayed a week and lost my bet every evening.

I would wander around the museums of the south of France, the Fernand Leger Museum at Biot, the Picasso Museum in the old castle at Antibes. In Paris, I would visit the Musee Cluny; I like small museums, and this one holds France's best examples of medieval art. In Oxford I would visit the Pitt Rivers collection, the eclectic collection of a traveler and antiquary. In Stockholm there are over sixty small museums that record the history of subjects as disparate as drink and house painting.

Far the best place to visit in Sweden is Drottningholm Palace, not for the palace itself, but for its eighteenth-century opera house, where Mozart's operas are still performed with their original costumes and sets, thunder is made by rolling stones in wooden drums, and the scenery moves on a complicated series of pulleys all from two centuries ago. After the opera, dinner at the Operakallaren, the restaurant that adjoins The Grand Opera House in Stockholm itself, red plush, smart waiters, and boiled elk with cranberry sauce and a couple of dozen glasses of schnapps to stimulate the digestive system. Out into the fresh night air, across bridges that span Stockholm's waterways, stopping to watch the seagulls as they seize fish from the city's waters, and to wonder why I did not lunch in Stockholm's fish market and eat a dozen different sorts of soused herrings, followed by boiled pike but caught in Stockholm's archipelago. Well, when you try to travel Europe in a day some things slip your mind.

I must press on--I still have the palace theaters of Italy to tackle, the one at Parma near the birthplace of Verdi, and at Vincenza the Olimpico, both masterpieces of trompe-l'oeil. Driving between Parma and Mantua in the rain one day I came on the best of all these theaters at a small town called Sabbioneta, a walled town that is caught in a time warp. Its theater, once used as a military barracks and then as an agricultural store, is now restored to almost its former glory; the proportions are near perfect, and its decoration, in the style of Veronese's frescoes at the Villa Maser, are a delight. To sit and listen to opera, the Fenice theater in Venice is my choice. I have sat in the great opera houses of Paris, Milan, and London; I have heard opera sung in the parks of Sydney and with a cast of a thousand before an audience of 22,000 in Verona's Coliseum; but there is nowhere that I enjoy opera more than at La Fenice, home to the opening nights of some of Verdi's most celebrated operas. Just to sit in this place is magic, and if the music is good and the work well sung, that is a bonus.

To dine after the theater we'll go to London, to the Garrick Club for its pictures and its members, Pratt's Club because its premises are peculiarly British and for that matter so are its members--to both places you must be taken. To dine grandly, the Ritz in Paris. (Incidentally, if you are tired from the pace of the day, then the health club at the Ritz is the place to recover and wonder at its decor.) Perhaps you will dine heavily at Lembcke's in Hamburg--goose and German wines, in that city whose nightlife is as robust as its cuisine. Or if we're dining later, Barcelona at the Seven Gates; the food of Barcelona is not truly Spanish--the Catalonians know how to cook. Eat there and then wander in the streets of that town, a paradise for insomniacs; nothing much gets started until well after midnight, you can walk safely in the streets and choose a bar or club that suits your taste. You will find me in the bar of Annabel's, still London's best nightspot; you will know me, for I will be sitting alone near the door to the dance floor drinking herb tea.

Spain, from Bars to Bullrings

BAR CUEVA is full. It's always full, for the simple reason, or so I deduce, that the locals think it the best flied-fish bar in Torre del Mar, a small Andalusian resort up the coast from Malaga.

So they--make that "we"--are crammed in here, elbow to elbow, noisily consuming platefuls of gamhas, almejas, calamares, boquerones, pulpo, rosada, chopitos . . . If it swims, clings to rocks, or walks the sea bed, the Spaniards eat it.

And I don't mean only those who live at or near the coast. Those in the capital, Madrid, situated in the center of this, the second most mountainous country in Europe, also demand their daily quota from the sea. Feeding this appetite requires fleets of trucks to heave their way overnight from the coast up to the high central plain. But it is done as a matter of course. For though Spain is not renowned for efficiency, what the Spanish deem important they do well. The production and serving of food are done superlatively well.

This efficiency extends to another great institution, los toros, the bullfight. It is one of the few Spanish activities guaranteed to start dead on time.

"Spain is different" was the slogan with which the country first sought to attract mass tourism. So it gloriously is. And the ritual (never, but never, "sport") of the bullfight is one of the more dramatically obvious manifestations of that difference. For that reason alone anyone wishing to understand the country should try to see at least one big-town corrida.

I was lucky enough to see my first bullfight in one of Spain's oldest and most beautiful rings, the Maestranza in Seville, during the city's renowned spring feria. Just before the start I was swept by a lowering wave of revulsion. Why on earth was I, unmanned simply by the opening credits of Bambi, so excited by the prospect of seeing six bulls put to death for the delectation of a raucous mob? The feeling was not dispelled by the colorful entry of the matadors and their teams. But it evaporated the moment the first bull rushed, bemused and angry, into the ring. And it has never returned, even though I have watched some execrable and depressing performances since.

Bullfighting has engendered more fanciful verbiage than almost any other activity known to man (naturally I exclude the Clintons' healthcare plan). I do not wish to add to it, except to say that when the bulls are brave and the matadors honest and skillful, a bullfight is a powerfully moving and mysterious experience.

Despite the increasing popularity of soccer and other spectator sports, bullfighting retains its appeal throughout the country. But it began as an Andalusian specialty, and that is where its most dedicated following is found today. Which leads me to confess that when I speak of "Spain" I'm speaking mainly with Andalusia in mind, something that irritates Spaniards.

But Andalusia seduces you into doing that. It is, after all, the most exotic and least European part of Spain. Indeed, remembering the French gibe that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees," it is the least European part of Europe; and, hemmed in and criss-crossed by mountain ranges, one of the least accessible.

This relative inaccessibility means that behind all those concrete costas a secret landscape lies, missed (I'm not complaining) by idle, incurious, or uninformed tourists. Much of the land of Andalusia is harsh and poor. Much of the landscape is unforgettable. Experience in spring, especially, the combination of azure skies, warm herbaceous scents, gleaming wildflowers, soaring hawks and eagles, and you understand why the Moors, the men from the deserts of North Africa, were so enraptured by it and why they clung on there for two and a half centuries longer than anywhere else in Spain.

You see their architectural and cultural legacy most dramatically in the cities of Cordoba, Seville, and Granada, not only in their great public buildings--such as, respectively, the Mosque, the Giralda, the Alhambra-but in the warren-like streets of their old quarters, and in the small, plant-bedecked courtyards, exquisite oases of coolness and calm.

Anyone willing to leave Bar Cueva can take the road cutting inland from Torre del Mar and within a few minutes begin to encounter the "old Spain" beloved of the travel books. Herds of goats still clatter through the market town, four miles away, to which Torre del Mar is administratively attached; teams of bullocks plow the surrounding fields; and small, weather-beaten men make their leisurely progress on mule or donkey. The traditional rhythms of Andalusian life still survive, even though newer melodies can be heard, the inevitable result of economic and material development. All the same, if you want to experience those rhythms, you had best be quick.