You don’t have to take Stepmother Nature’s dirty tricks lying down : RAINY DAY ROVING

You awaken to an ominous pitter-patter on the windowpane. It is raining. Only this time it’s different. It’s raining on your vacation--that precious, planned-for, halcyon holiday of wine, roses and sunshine in which you’ve invested a tidy sum. This is another of Stepmother Nature’s dirty tricks, but you don’t have to take it lying down. By and large, people verge on paranoia about nasty weather on their travels. Bona fide worrywarts may go so far as to take out foul-weather insurance, as others insure against theft, lost baggage and canceled travel arrangements. I myself really don’t care much what the weather does as long as I’m not caught in a desert with no sun-screen lotion, or in a rainstorm with leaky shoes. This insouciance is nothing to brag about--just a matter of genes, I think. Granted that a rainy day does pose some problems. You’ll just have to wait till the sun shines, Nellie, to idle away an afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne or Regent’s Park or the Borghese Gardens, but there are plenty of well-sheltered options that can be infinitely rewarding. The crux of making the most of a rainy day is to choose a pursuit that will offer long-term shelter with a little entertainment or action thrown in. Here’s your chance to go somewhere and do something that’s not on the usual tourist’s must-see list. Any current event that attracts the natives is bound to be rewarding, if only for its people-watching potential. In Milan, upon the advice of a desk clerk at the Principe e Savoia, I spent as undismal a dismal day as ever there was at a mammoth food fair in one of the city’s famous exhibition buildings. What a magnificently Lucullan affair--acres and acres of hams, sausages, cheeses, olives layered in different colors in tremendous glass jars, vivid mosaics of preserved fruits, candies, biscotti , fresh green groceries presented like flower gardens, pasta machines and espresso machines. The air was fragrant with the aroma of roasting coffee.

One Sunday in Paris, although drenched, I went to St. Sulpice for Mass, which was followed by a heavenly recital of organ music. A rainy day is made to order for shopping, especially the big-department-store kind. Nothing can give you a better slant on the ethos or temperament of any community, at home or abroad, than the kind of goods offered for sale in its popular stores. To mind come certain big stores that make mighty fine umbrellas and are sightseeing attractions in themselves. In New York, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Altman’s, Lord & Taylor, Gimbel’s; in Chicago, Marshall Field’s; in Paris, Au Printemps, Galeries Lafayette, Le Bon Marche and the erstwhile Louvre department store that has turned into an antiques center.

World-acclaimed biggies in Scandinavia are Stockholm’s Nordiska Kompaniet and Helsinki’s Stockmann’s, and in Copenhagen there’s tempting and leisurely browsing at Den Permanente , where Denmark’s top-quality crafts are represented, and at Illum’s Bolighus , a home furnishings store especially noted for its charming displays. And, of course, in London, Harrods is an institution that shouldn’t be missed, rain or shine. London has many arcades, the best known and possibly most chic being the Burlington Arcade.

All over the map, great enclosed--often underground--shopping malls, little cities of goods and services, are proliferating as if in preparation for a rainy day. Some that have already become landmarks are Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, where enclosed walkways between buildings keep you out of traffic and the elements.

There is the labyrinthine, tunnel-system shop-and-restaurant mall on Louisiana Street that is Houston’s pride and joy; Montreal’s underground city, Place Ville-Marie and the adjacent Place Bonaventure; Toronto’s Eaton Centre; the Forum des Halles in Paris, a hole in the ground where the old market used to be, now elegantly filled in with shops that purvey everything from designer clothes to computers; Stockholm’s Gallerian, which encloses several city blocks and provides snug shopping for anything in the world that you could conceivably desire from a fish dinner to an art gallery acquisition, with auction rooms and a huge, prestigious book shop on hand. And for decades now, at the splash of a raindrop, New Yorkers have hied themselves to the subterranean marts beneath Rockefeller Center.

For me, book browsing is the No. 1 way to spend any day, in any weather. Should you ever find yourself in Herefordshire in England’s West Country, hasten to Hay-on-Wye, a town given over utterly to secondhand books. But if that happy haunt evades you, I’d say any book shop in a storm--the bigger the better for browsing.

On a rainy day, try sampling the subways of the world. My favorite remains the Paris Metro, so easy to figure out, and the Louvre station is a charmer, with museum exhibits right on the subway platform. Munich’s underground is pretty nifty, too, and there then are Montreal’s smooth-riding rubber-tired trains.

Holes in the ground are a reminder that the London Silver Vaults, said to be the greatest cache of silverware in the world, are bound to put a gleam in your eye on an unsunny day. They’re in Chancery Lane, with the Law Courts nearby. Old Bailey, in Newgate Street, is where criminal cases are tried; it is also available to the public, the cases naturally juicier in this land of the whodunit.

I once spent a most edifying wet afternoon at an auction in Sotheby’s in London. It was a little intimidating, because had I scratched my ear or nodded at the wrong time, I risked hearing the courtly auctioneer say, “Sold to the lady in the orange mackintosh.” Anyway, an auction can be rainy-day fun. Top-notch galleries in New York are Sotheby Parke Bernet, Christie’s, and William Doyle, who lately disposed of Gloria Swanson’s possessions.

Museums, like the movies, theater or concerts, are obviously great places to hole up in on a drizzly day. Many museums have food facilities, but I never heard of one that enjoyed any Michelin stars, except that the luncheons at London’s Tate Gallery have been very kindly spoken of. However, I tend to take a dim view of any longtime haul in any museum, simply because mental indigestion overtakes me after a couple of hours.

In Madrid, I’d rather visit the Royal Carpet Factory or the handcrafts centers than try to cope with the Prado, and in Paris I’d rather look in on a Cordon Bleu cooking demonstration than tackle the Louvre. I’d also give a thought to boating through the sewers (except if a downpour is heavy, then all is canceled). And in Rome and Paris, there are always the catacombs--early Christian and Jewish hideaways and tombs.

Small, under-powering, offbeat museums seem like good rainy-day fare to me. Paris has a new perfume museum, Parfumerie Fragonard, on Rue de Scribe, which sounds like a lovely spirit-lifter. Kassel, Germany, has a wallpaper museum, and in Italy, there’s a spaghetti museum near San Remo that has long been one of my travel aspirations.

Caves, although I can take them or leave them, seem to be nature’s own cover-ups for a rainy day. The most impressive, deepest, vastest one I’ve ever been in is far afield in Demanova, Czechoslovakia, brilliant in color and loaded with Buddhas, organ pipes, angels’ wings and cathedral spires, lakes and rivers--all those things caves usually have but more.

It is said by the Irish that it never rains in a pub. Your real, bona fide pub, to be found only in Ireland or England, is something of a neighborhood social center as well as a drinking hole where voices may be raised in local gossip, personal philosophy, politics, storytelling or song.

Some pubs of record, in my book: in Ireland, Durty Nellie’s, Bunratty, County Clare; Aherne’s (really a top-notch seafood restaurant), Youghal, County Cork; O’Donoghue’s, Neary’s, The Lord Edward, Byrnes, The Brazen Head (oldest of the lot and looks it)--all in Dublin. In London, George and Vulture, and Prospect of Whitby are old standbys. Fun, although considered corny by local sophisticates, are Sherlock Holmes, furnished like 221-B Baker Street, and Gilbert and Sullivan, which celebrates those operettas you either adore or abhor.

Inclement weather seems to bring on the urge to indulge oneself, so what better way to defy the elements and give the budget that old go-for-broke treatment than to book for lunch in the poshest place you can find on your list, with the determination to make an afternoon of it, starting off with an aperitif, melding into hors d’oeuvres, entree and lavish dessert, not to omit a little lapping up of the wines of the region? You have to be given to such rainy-day luncheon follies. I’ve registered quite a few of them, from Montauk (Gurney’s) to Mykonos (an unidentified but memorable waterfront dispensary of ouzo , coffee and perfectly fried fish). But my most reckless extravaganza--and really most enjoyable--was to hire a limousine to drive me 50 miles through the drizzle from Paris to Montfort-l’Amaury for a long lunch at Chez Nous and a visit to Maurice Ravel’s house. Worth every franc.

Philosophical postscript: On a bus crowded with people grousing about the rain and shaking their wet umbrellas all over each other, a very old lady announced out loud, “Every day that God makes is beautiful.” I guess she’s right. All I know is that there’s got to be some rain before you can see a rainbow.