LUXE VEGAS

I had a vision when I flew here last week for the opening of the Bellagio hotel, built center stage on the Strip behind an ersatz Italian village on a 10-acre replica of Lake Como. It was windy and cool, but breathtakingly clear, the wide desert valley where the city has mushroomed curving gently toward the dry mountains that surround it. Driving from McCarran airport, as I turned my rental car onto Las Vegas Boulevard, I fancied that the Strip went on forever in a ring circling the globe, lined by Luxors, Excaliburs, MGM Grands, miniature Manhattans and an unending procession of as yet unimagined theme hotels.

It could happen. Fifty years ago there was virtually nothing here when Vegas visionary Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel built the Flamingo. Countless neon-lighted casino hotels followed until 1966, when Jay Sarno changed the game on the Strip by erecting his great white coliseum of kitsch, Caesars Palace. “Everybody in the hotel is a Caesar,” said Sarno, thereby recognizing that when the dice cooled and the slots failed to yield, there were still other cravings that Las Vegas could feed. So now when we visit the desert city, besides gambling we indulge our favorite fantasies, briefly living like Caesars, pharaohs and kings.

But it took Steve Wynn, chairman of Mirage Resorts, to give us the most opulent pleasure palace in Vegas yet. Built on the site of the demolished Dunes hotel, the Bellagio has 3,000 rooms, 16 restaurants (including the legendary Le Cirque, imported from New York), 20,000-square-foot suites with 4 1/2 baths, a shopping concourse lined by only the toniest boutiques (Tiffany, Gucci, Prada, Hermes, Chanel, Armani), a glamorous 1,800-seat opera house for a new Cirque du Soleil show--and, oh yes, a casino. The price tag for all this was $1.6 billion--not counting the $300 million Wynn spent to line the walls of the hotel’s vaunted gallery and high-end restaurants with Monets and Picassos--making the Bellagio the most expensive hotel in the world.

Consequently, rooms at the butter yellow 36-story hotel are costly. Though rates officially start at $159 a night (with $99 specials offered during slow times), the least expensive double was priced at $329 when the Bellagio opened just before midnight on Oct. 15, with crowds jamming the pavement as 1,200 water jets erupted in a curtain of spray across the whitecapped lake, reaching their 240-foot zenith as Luciano Pavarotti hit the high note in a recorded version of “Rondine al Nido.”

Clearly, Mom, Pop and the kids, who’ve been the recent target market at family-style hotel-casinos like Circus Circus, won’t be able to afford it. But the Bellagio isn’t for Mom, Pop and the kids--it aims to draw high rollers and the sort of sophisticates who’ve shunned Las Vegas in the past. The rates may even seem relatively unremarkable when a crop of new luxury hotels opens on the Strip in the next few years, including Italian twins the Venetian and the Lido (with a total of 6,000 rooms); a 424-room Four Seasons that will occupy the top five floors of the gold-plated Mandalay Bay at the south end of the Strip; and the 2,914-room Paris, rising right across the street from the Bellagio behind a faux Eiffel Tower.

Besides being in the vanguard, Wynn has shrewdly come up with a compelling new fantasy to attract people to the Bellagio, far more adult than the ones on display at theme-park hotels down the block. And it isn’t just the romantic landscape and architecture of the Italian lakes that set the atmosphere. Once you take in the sun-burnished Tuscan village fronting Lake Como (the real one is actually in Lombardy), circle the shimmering water edged by cascading tiers of balconies and pass through the impressive glass and wrought-iron porte-cochere, the Italian lake district yields.

Inside the long vaulted lobby, the ambience is all European grand hotel, where every man looks like Cary Grant in a tux; every woman, like Grace Kelly, wears a diamond bracelet outside her long white evening gloves; and everybody knows the difference between Impressionism and Postimpressionism without consulting Janson’s “History of Art.”

“And so it begins,” to borrow the tag line from the oft-aired Bellagio TV spot that features the international pop-opera hit “Con Te Partiro,” sung by the blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli (scheduled to perform at the hotel over New Year’s). I forgot to pack my pearls, but my expectations were high, raised by rumors that Clint Eastwood and Michael Jordan would be on hand for opening weekend, by the prospect of seeing Van Gogh’s “Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat” and by Wynn himself, who’s done a good deal of braying about his magnum opus. “This is a better collection of Impressionist pictures than the Getty’s,” he told Vanity Fair. “Of course, they’ve got Old Masters. And they’ll catch up eventually. If they get lucky.”

Still, I tried to keep my high hopes leashed because, with 2,700 guests checking in that first Friday, hordes of oglers tramping through to play the nickel slots and sample the $12 lunch buffet, and Wynn throwing a weekend-long private party for hundreds of invited guests, I knew that the scene would be chaotic.

At the long marble front desk, I learned that if you walked in off the street you could still get a room for the weekend, and that the concierge didn’t think it was even worth trying to call for a dinner reservation at Prime, the restaurant run by New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, because the phone lines were too busy to get through. And I saw artist Dale Chihuly, wearing lime green trousers and a hot pink shirt, posing for pictures beneath his sculpture of huge glass flowers, “Fiori di Como,” hanging from the lobby ceiling.

There are two restaurants in this wing of the hotel--the relatively modest Cafe Bellagio and stylish Aqua--as well as a health spa (entrance $25 a day both for outsiders and hotel guests), where you can have a Hungarian Thermal Mineral Bath ($45) or use the machines in a rather uninviting workout room.

Next to the spa is a branch of L.A.’s Prive Salon, where I saw Martha Stewart having a pedicure. Beyond that is the crowded entrance to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. There, I purchased a $10 ticket to see the collection the following day. I also bought one for my brother, John, who likes to gamble and planned to drive in from L.A. to meet me late that night.

Before I went up to my room, I stopped at the Petrossian Bar, a champagne and caviar place that serves tea from 2 to 5. For 10 minutes, a covey of long-legged waitresses ignored me until I spoke up, ordering a Bellagio hors d’oeuvre selection ($18) and a cup of Earl Grey tea. Ten more minutes passed before my server returned to tell me that she couldn’t find a tea bag. I suggested she seek one out at the Cafe Bellagio around the corner, which she promised to do. The hors d’oeuvres were tasty enough, but the Earl Grey never appeared, though I asked for it a second time, pointing out to the maitre d’ as I left that there’d be hell to pay at teatime.

Taking opening weekend jitters into consideration, I quickly forgave the Bellagio, as I did later when it took 20 minutes to get that cup of tea at an espresso bar on the promenade leading out to the pool. There must have been half a dozen servers behind the counter--laconic, or distracted or just out of high school and woefully untrained. They were all courteous to a fault, graciously intoning “I’m so sorry” whenever they had trouble with their computers, or wouldn’t allow me to enter the pool area to read a newspaper before official opening time, or failed to let me into my room when I discovered that my keys didn’t work after repeated calls from the hall house phone.

I have to admit that the pool area was lovely, surrounded by olive trees, Lombardy pines and Italian cypresses twisting in the wind as if in a Van Gogh. What’s more, the service was flawless at the bar in Aqua that night, where a Robert Rauschenberg hangs near the entrance, and I had a black mussel souffle appetizer chased by a martini. Nor were there glitches at Olive’s on the shopping concourse, where I followed up my first course with the most delectable tortelli of butternut squash imaginable (the sweet secret, devised by Boston chef Todd English, is in the amaretto cookie stuffing). But even my brother, who turns surprisingly patient and affable in Las Vegas, joined me in dismay when it took ages to get a cup of coffee at the Pool Cafe the next morning.

During my two-night stay, I was on hand for the Las Vegas debut of Michael Feinstein at the Fontana Bar (with Michael Milken shaking hands in the audience), watched a World Series game in an easy chair in the sports book section of the casino and slept soundly in a neoclassical-style double on the 12th floor, about a quarter-mile hike from the lobby.

The room had a beige patterned carpet, two plump double beds, a swag-curtained window overlooking Nevada 15 (even though I’d asked for a view of Lake Como) and a marble-tiled bathroom with a separate shower and bath. But there weren’t enough hangers in the armoire, and some misogynist had decided that mouthwash is a better complimentary toiletry than bath and shower gel. So in the end, I really couldn’t see a striking difference between this room and the $69 double I rented at the Mirage a year ago.

I could see the difference between dining almost anywhere and having a meal at Le Cirque, brought to Vegas by New York’s premier restaurateur, Sirio Maccioni. John and I had lunched at Circo, the Italian eatery next door with a cheery circus decor, run by one of Maccioni’s sons. There, my spinach gnocchi and my brother’s grilled octopus were underwhelming. But when John ordered a $65 bottle of Puligny Montrachet and asked if the unfinished bottle could be put aside for dinner later at Le Cirque, the sommelier obliged--a true class act, we agreed.

So it was that we had one of the great white Burgundies of France with Le Cirque’s tasting menu (for $90 per person), including succulent sauteed domestic foie gras, sea bass en papillote, a prime little piece of beef surrounded by vegetables and three extraordinary desserts. Generally, desserts don’t sway me, but Le Cirque’s chocolate dice, filled with white and Madagascar chocolate, is something to die for.

As is Steve Wynn’s art collection. It fills two little rooms that seem small, dark and somehow anticlimactic coming after the giant cornucopia display. Nevertheless, John and I stood for a long time gazing at Joan Miro’s beguiling “Dialogue of the Insects” and Henri Matisse’s sunny “Pineapple and Anemones.” I won’t tell you about the Van Goghs. You need to see them for yourself and hear Wynn’s taped exegeses, which will make you appreciate what fun he must have had shopping for his masterpieces with a New York art dealer--like Art History 101 with a checkbook. And though Wynn’s motive is clearly commercial (the paintings are even for sale), he has done the Southwest a good deed in bringing such major modern French painting to the region.

Still, when I checked out of the Bellagio, I felt slightly dejected. The hotel is undoubtedly the grandest, most ambitious thing on the Strip. But on a certain level it troubles me to see art used as an inducement to gaming. Had the hotel itself been perfect, perhaps I’d have felt differently. But considering the Bellagio has more than 9,000 employees and my room cost $329, I thought the service could have been better.

Then, too, there’s a decided downside to the high-class, high-culture fantasy the Bellagio proffers, a tone of upward striving and trying too hard. It’s rather like Charlie the Tuna trying to prove he has the stuff to get into a Starkist can.

Next time I’m in Las Vegas, I’ll probably head back to the Mirage or the Golden Nugget. Which shouldn’t trouble Wynn because he runs them too.

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GUIDEBOOK

Haute Las Vegas

Where to stay: The Bellagio, 3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South, Las Vegas, NV 89109; telephone (888) 987-6667 or (702) 693-7111, fax (702) 693-8546, has about 3,000 rooms and suites, numerous outdoor swimming pools and hot tubs, a spa and salon, 16 restaurants, an opera house, a shopping concourse and a casino. Rates generally start at $159 for a deluxe room, $209 for a tower deluxe room (slightly bigger) and $250 to $1,400 for suites. But prices vary, with a $109 special rate for a deluxe room available during the week before Thanksgiving.

For more information: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 3150 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89109; tel. (702) 892-7575.