A Look Inside One of 50 Save Venice Dinners That Happened Last Weekend

In recent New York history, the glitziest gala of the year—excluding Vogue’s own Met gala—was a fundraising event to benefit Save Venice, the nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the cultural and artistic heritage of Italy’s floating city. (Past years have seen Lauren Santo Domingo chair a sumptuous masquerade ball at the Plaza Hotel, where guests dripped in finery just as gilded at the neobaroque boiserie in the hotel’s ballroom.)

As the organization was founded in 1971, this year marked half a century of saving Venice, an effort that has most recently involved restoring 2,442 square feet of precious Byzantine apse mosaics in the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello and the Italian Synagogue in the Ghetto of Venice—two of many examples of the work undertaken by the group.

In lieu of one big springtime Manhattan-set bash, this year’s celebration was orchestrated a little differently. Throughout the world, 50 events are being put on during 2021 and early 2022 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary. “We invite our friends and supporters to host intimate events...in honor of the 50th Anniversary and to celebrate life, art, and resilience—all the qualities of La Serenissima,” instructed Save Venice. Stateside, soirées stretched from coast to coast. In Sag Harbor, New York, Mercedes de Guardiola hosted a group aboard a yacht. In Manhattan, Arden Wohl and Denise Wohl helmed an event. In Houston, it was Randa and K.C. Weiner, and over in Beverly Hills, Ruth and Hutton Wilkinson did the honors.

Yours truly had the opportunity to attend the dinner hosted by Alexandra Rose, Louis Rose, and Tracey Roberts last Friday in Newport, Rhode Island. Mrs. Roberts offered up her home on Price Neck, and on her green lawn—which offers prime views onto Newport’s blue-blue waters—stood a white tent strung with lights. At twilight, the Newport set arrived at a cocktail hour made even more harmonious by a string quartet.

In attendance were Meredith Wood Prince, Susie Matheson, Joanna DeNeufville, Meg Braff, and Ruthie and Luke McDonough, among others. As Rose pointed out in the remarks she delivered to her seated guests, they were a group who knew all too well the need to safeguard cultural history; many of them are active in Newport’s own historical society, which allows visitors from all over into the gilded age manses that dot Bellevue Avenue. “Here in Newport, we know more than anyone why we need to preserve our past and why Save Venice is such an important organization,” Rose said, wearing a striking Ferrari-red puff-sleeve dress by Oscar de la Renta. It was a dress she saw on the brand’s Instagram account, and she bought up the sample before it hit stores this September. “I saw it and thought, It’s perfect for Save Venice!” Her cohost Roberts, meanwhile, opted for a drapey Valentino dress the color of fuchsia, which she picked out in Milan.

Cocktails melded into dinner, which gave everyone the invitation to play a glamorous game of musical chairs and catch up once more on the lawn, now lit up by an almost full moon. After dinner, an impromptu after-party came together once everyone had relocated to the front porch of one of the partygoers. Nearby were some of the 20th century’s most storied Newport cottages, which, at the moment, seemed only to underline the evening’s mission.