As you recall, there has been quite a kerfuffle due to the perceived misstep of Giorgia Boscolo, who has just passed the first tiny step in the long road toward becoming the first woman gondolier, with regard to her behavior toward the press.
Several voices have chimed in, making a sort of quartet: Giorgia, her sister Alessia, Aldo Rosso (president of the Ente Gondola) and Roberto Luppi, head of the bancali, who are the heads of the gondola stations.
There was a brief attempt to climb aboard the situation by Eleanora Mingati, chief of the legal office of the Listening Center for Social Disadvantage, by claiming that this situation represented “maschilismo” (male chauvinism) by the gondoliers.
Mr. Rosso met it head-on. “The person who is making a distinction between male and female, not looking just at the person, is precisely this lady,” he told the Gazzettino. “The Ente Gondola deserves applause because it admitted Ms. Boscolo to the substitute gondoliers’ school. That means that she deserved it.” And no more was heard about that.
Alessia repeated the sequence of events as recounted by Giorgia: “What do you mean, ‘agent’ — I’m just her sister,” she said. “Giorgia asked me to give her a hand because she couldn’t deal with it all, phone calls, proposals, invitations. All she asked me to do was answer the phone. It’s true that I’m helping her — she’s got a husband and two little kids, she can’t handle the situation that’s developed after she was admitted to the school.”
Giorgia herself made a series of statements of varying degrees of distress and surprise, and had a meeting with Mr. Rosso and Mr. Luppi. “I’m not sure where I goofed,” she said, “but all this has fallen on me unexpectedly. I knew that a woman admitted to the gondoliers’ school would make news, but I never expected all the attention I got.”
The upshot: Mr. Rosso has said that Giorgia can certainly be photographed and interviewed by whomever she likes — it’s her life. “I merely reminded her that whenever she speaks, she’s speaking only for herself, not the entire category of gondoliers. Whether she’s paid for it or not, that has nothing to do with us.”
Mr. Luppi repeated that; she can do whatever she wants, but it’s on her own account, not representing the entire cadre. “I’d remind her to pay attention to what she says,” he said, “because she’s also going to be judged on her behavior. And that doesn’t apply only to her, but to each of the 22 aspiring substitute gondoliers.”
I have to say I feel a little better, and I feel safe in supposing she feels even better than I do.
The last few days the atmosphere here has been roiled by the development of the latest chapter in the saga known as: A Woman Gondolier.
Summary: A woman has just passed the first test, for the first time in 900 years of 100% male gondoliering, to be admitted to gondolier school and get the chance to take more tests and then hopefully to become a certified gondolier.
Then she kind of stepped on a rake in the dark. So now the story isn’t that she passed the test, it’s whether she’s going to be able to find a way to get back on the boat (so to speak) after having fallen so spectacularly into a channel of her own making. Or whether her miscalculations will have provided her opponents with a reason to keep the guild in male hands, if only till the next girl gives it a shot. Or how much penance she’s going to have to do in order to make it all right again.
In the 18th century the gondolas, and at least some of the gondoliers, were different.
(Full disclosure: I am not opposed to women being gondoliers. I am opposed to women doing stupid things, especially in public. Men too.)
Her name is Giorgia Boscolo, and no, she’s not the first woman to try. At least one other Venetian girl took and failed the last test a few years ago, though only by a very few points. At least a few people saw this as a positive step, in the sense that if a woman gondolier were to be inevitable, at least her being Venetian would mute the pain.
The gondolier's life looks so romantic as he rows at sunset toward the Bridge of Sighs.
Meanwhile, over the past decade or so, a German woman named Alexandra Hai tried and failed four times. I think that’s a record, not only for Attempts but for Lack of Self-Knowledge and Willful Ignorance of the Terrain. Hers is a tale for a completely different post, so I’ll merely remark that her lack of success wasn’t due to being a woman — how very simple that would be, and how very easy to refute, deny, or ignore — but more the result of her fantastically obnoxious self-promotion and the insufferably Prussian way she went about trying to crush all obstacles in her path. I think it’s fair to say while she was the first to turn the dreaded subject of a female gondolier from a diverting theory into a credible possibility, she also created more antipathy to the idea than was ever needed; not only did she fail to crush the existing obstacles, she left a few new ones in her wake over which the next candidate(s) had to struggle. Thanks for the solidarity, babe.
Much of the day, however, is spent either waiting for work or dealing with the hassles of what comes along. Hot, tiring, monotonous -- what's not to like?
Back to Giorgia. She is nowhere near being the first woman gondolier — yet. What she did was to pass the first rowing test, which involves rowing in the bow position of a gondola with another gondolier rowing astern. Yes, you can screw up even something so incredibly simple, at least in theory, but
Getting your clients ashore safely -- not really part of the glamor.
she squeaked through, placing last in the list of 22 available spaces for aspiring gondoliers. Squeaking is fine, but she also tied with someone, a man, as it happens. But fortunately for people who might tend toward the sexist (pick her because she’s a woman, don’t pick her because she’s a woman) they can fall back on ageism, as the regulations specify that in case of a tie, the younger candidate passes. She’s 23 and the other guy, well, isn’t.
Her plusses:
She’s Venetian.
She’s young.
She’s married and the mother of two small boys (well if she’s 23, they’d better be small!).
She’s attractive, in a blonde, slightly zaftig way, the kind of girl you could picture coming from a farm in Wisconsin.
Her father is a gondolier.
Each item on this list comes with the sound of a key turning the deadlock toward the “open” position.
Her minuses:
She’s not actually 24-karat Venetian; “Boscolo” is a very common last name in Chioggia, a town at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon which many Venetians regard with scorn and derision. There are historical reasons for this viewpoint which go back at least 600 years.
She’s young. Lack of life experience has shown itself to be more important than one might have thought.
Her father is a gondolier. This is only a fraction of a minus; some unkind observers might have thought this gave her an unfair advantage. In my view, it gave her a fair advantage in the sense that she was able to have unlimited access to a gondola and to expert rowing advice.
If you want to get ahead, you sometimes have to do the scutwork for real gondoliers, such as cleaning and setting up the boat for the day.
So what went wrong? The day after the grades were in, a tsunami of publicity swept over her. Blogs and the press went crackerdogs. The First! A Woman! Blonde! Venetian! And so on.
Did I mention the press? It turns out that she forgot/didn’t know to ask the Ente Gondola, the gondoliers’ association, for permission to give all those interviews and pose for photographs. But there it is, clearly spelled out in the by-laws, a rule that states that any talking to the press by anybody about anything needs to get the prior approval of the officers.
Not only did she make that error, going full-steam ahead on her own authority, she also made a few extra missteps which were reported (perhaps not completely accurately, but the damage was done) such as having referred interview requests to her agent, and requiring payment to pose for pictures.
Agent? PAYMENT??
For virtually all its history, Venice (by which I mean Venetians, naturally) has had a fathomless aversion to self-promotion, conceit, and generally not getting over yourself. It doesn’t mean that nobody ever says another person is great — they do, actually — it just means that a person can’t say it about himself without encountering some kind of consequences.
There are still some gondoliers who dress perfectly, down to the traditional beret with pompom. Until the Sixties, gondoliers always wore a black wool beret in the winter, and a white cotton version in summer. The now-ubiquitous straw hat -- once normally seen on farmers gathering snails - is now worn year-round, from blazing summer heat to winter fog, rain and snow.
So now the consequences for her are that she may have risked her still-new position. If the Ente Gondola finds her importantly in the wrong, I’m not sure what the by-laws stipulate. If I were her, I’d be worrying, despite her copious meaculpas and explanations in the paper today. (Actually, she didn’t admit she’d made a mistake. She said, “If I made a mistake, I apologize.” If this job doesn’t work out, she could always run for public office.)
But let’s say that she succeeds in rowing herself across this flaming lake of fire and gets safely to the other side. (Her list of plusses, as above, ought to be of help.) She still has a lot of work to do before she can say she’s passed to the next rung of gondolierdom. The system works like this:
The aspiring gondolier who has passed the first rowing test must attend a series of courses of at least one foreign language, and Venetian history and art. Then comes another test, given by the Veneto region. He/she eventually also has to pass another rowing test, this time much more important and difficult: Rowing alone astern, as a regular gondolier must do. And this test doesn’t take you up the middle of the Grand Canal, but through the small side canals around all sorts of diabolical corners. If the wind is gusting and you’re going with the tide, it gets even better.
At that point, the successful aspirant must serve a sort of apprenticeship with a licensed gondolier for at least six months. Then he/she qualifies as a substitute, and will continue as a substitute for whichever gondolier needs someone to stand in for him for whatever reason until a license becomes available. Which isn’t often.
So before we get all emotional about the first woman gondolier, we should keep in mind that she has a very long road ahead of her, traveling which she will almost certainly find herself burdened with a fardel of mistrust and bad feeling which could make the going hard. Memories are long here and everybody pretty much watches everybody else with the eyesight of the great horned owl. And gondoliers especially tend to settle accounts their own way, even if it takes years.
Updates as they come in.
P.S.: You will have understood that I have not shown any photographs of our heroine because of her restrictions, as well as copyright on the pictures already taken. You’ll just have to imagine her for a while.
If only people were as elegant, strong, responsive, versatile and trustworthy as this boat.
Our week in Corfu (known to the Greeks as Kerkyra) with the club’s gondolone (8-oar gondola) was interesting, entertaining, diverting — I pause before applying the word “fun,” though it was certainly much more fun than a slap across the belly with a wet fish.
Venice ruled Corfu -- the door, hinge, and key to the Adriatic -- from 1501 to 1797, and held it against three Ottoman sieges. Corfu was the only part of Greece which never fell under Turkish domination.
I’m using generic terms, though, because it was sort of a generic experience. We’ve been to Greece with the boat for other events, so I have some means of comparison.
The basic outline was to load the boat onto a truck (the truck travels on the ferry with us); we departed at 2:00 PM and arrived in Corfu at 1:30 PM the next day.
Then we unloaded the boat and rowed it to its base camp in a small marina under the flank of the Old Fortress.
Getting ready to go to work.
The marina had a good bar, too, with excellent lemonade. These things matter.
The occasion for all this was a long weekend labeled “Italian Days,” a collection of cross-cultural events more or less arranged around the finish of the Brindisi-Corfu yacht race. It was as good a reason as any to choose the second weekend of June.
Apart from the yachts, the program concentrated on the many links binding Venice and Corfu over the centuries — a bond which was
A plaque on an external wall of the New Fortress records in Latin that the work of fortification was completed in 1728 by Marco Antonio Diedo and Giorgio Grimani, under Doge Alvise III Mocenigo. The winged lion of San Marco makes it official.
maintained for the almost 500 years in which Venice essentially owned the island. A few links that weren’t acknowledged much were the commercial, political, and military ones, which only left Links Lite such as literature and art. (By “commercial link” I mean things like the fact that most of the 3 million olive trees on the island were planted by the Venetians, whose interest obviously was not landscape gardening but the olives and their oil.) There were also lectures and concerts and exhibitions and so on.
A relief carving of the town and Old Fortress (at the time, the Only Fortress) of Corfu, affixed to the facade of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio in Venice. It is one of six depictions of places at which Adm. Antonio Barbaro served the Republic. In the lower left corner is the faint outline of an L-shaped breakwater which created a small harbor (helpfully demonstrated by the outline of the galley). Now used by a local boating club, this harbor is where we stowed the boat at night.
There was also an official press conference in the mayor’s office, with the usual speeches and exchanges of shiny official dust-gatherers.
(L to r) H.E. Giampaolo Scarante, Italian Ambassador to Greece, the mayor of Corfu, and the President of the City Council of Venice.
(L to r, foreground) Two procurators of the Venetian Republic, whose red tunic indicates they are of the Lower Chamber; a Capitan da mar, the general admiral in time of war, distinguished by his inverted-cone hat; the doge, also distinguished by his headwear, called the "corno"; another procurator. (L to r, second row) Two fanti da mar, members of an infantry regiment assigned to ships of the Venetian navy. All costumes are accurate for the first half of the 1500s.
The scene was completed by a contingent of “figuranti,” or historic-costume/re-enactors from the “Serenisimo Tribunal de l’Inquisithion,” the Venice chapter of an organization known as CERS, the Consortium of European Re-enactment Societies. Among the various characters represented with great accuracy is, naturally, a doge. The doge in this group is a great guy, he’s a retired fire chief. Bedecked in all his regalia, he has a way of appearing both imposing and ingratiating, not an easy trick and something I doubt any real doge ever tried.
Our boat was probably the most Venetian element of all, especially considering how much pounding she’s taken and how little maintenance she’s ever been given. Being pounded and neglected being two of the primary aspects of Venice today, I mean.
Our job was to be at the prescribed place at the prescribed hours to offer free boat rides to anybody who wanted to be rowed in a gondola (even a big one) for a few minutes.
Here’s my quick scorecard:
The plus side:
The trip on the overnight Minoan Lines ferry from Venice to Corfu. Leaving Venice on a ship — in fact, going anywhere on a ship — is the best. It was fun the first time because it was strange and new; it was fun the seventh time because it was familiar.
Hanging out with my friends, a very eccentric bunch with curious bits of personality flapping around like untied shoelaces. In the un-eccentric contingent I place His Excellency Giampaolo Scarante, the Italian Ambassador to Greece, and his effervescent wife, Barbara, who are two total mensches and our guardian angels. It’s due to them that we are invited to join these frolics.
Being in Greece. It’s never bad. It’s impossible for it to be bad. Greece, however touristic it may have become, never disappoints me. On the contrary.
The sun. I love the sun and this is one sun that means what it says. You walk out the front door and you feel like you’ve just been thrown face-down on a skillet. I like this for short periods; then what I really like is sitting in the shade sipping a frappe, or iced coffee. The cafe offered us little ice-cream bonbons, too, which was a novelty — perfect in the heat, but only if you ate them within 18 seconds of their arrival. Which was not a problem for me.
The food. I love Greek food, though some of my Venetian cohorts reserved judgment (mostly) because many of them are unapologetic food fascists who think the only fodder worth ingesting is Italian.
The rowing, what little of it we ever eventually got to do. The wind in the afternoon made the return to base camp extremely diverting, not to mention the waves from the many passing ferries and hovercraft.
Seeing the Venetian fortresses, the Old and the New. Both are stupendous constructions, which resist admiring adjectives as effectively as every missile the Turks hurled at them in three failed sieges.
The Old Fortress, on the site of a Byzantine fort, was built, enlarged, and re-fortified between the 13th and 16th centuries. It now provides office and other space for various departments of the city government, as well as for the University of the Ionian.
We had to pass through the Old Fortress four times a day and it just got more amazing each time, not to mention rounding the very point of the peninsula where the fort looms in order to get to our rendezvous point. If nothing else, looking at the fort from whatever distance or perspective made you realize in a visceral way how important Corfu was to the Venetian Republic, and how seriously the Venetians intended that the island should not fall into Ottoman hands, which would have been the End of Everything. And they succeeded. I know they were bandits but they really got the job done.
The crew, having clocked out, leaves the Old Fortress.
The minus side:
Lack of customers. Unfortunately, the heat, lack of publicity, and disastrous location of our boat worked against the hoped-for mass of passengers. The few that wandered past were more or less like stragglers from the Retreat from Caporetto.
Our hours, which were 10-1 and 5-8. Looks good on paper, but not so good when you’re tied up next to an esplanade that qualifies as the concrete equivalent of the Nefud Desert, the one Lawrence of Arabia had to cross at night, otherwise they’d all have died. 8-10 AM would have been perfect, as far as the climate is concerned, because the early morning is heavenly, but no Greek (or tourist) in his right, or even totally deranged, mind, would ever be up at that hour. So our window of opportunity was really from 10-10:15. Of course we were good soldiers and waited, till even we couldn’t take it anymore. Ditto the afternoon. After about 6:30 a person can begin to imagine going out on the water, but by then we had lost whatever desire to perform that we might have had, and any potential passengers were thinking of showers, drinks and dinner.
In the organizers’ defense, however, I can’t think of any other embarkation point that would have been even slightly feasible. So there you are.
Lino thinking Corfiote thoughts, in the center of the Sun's Anvil. The Old Fortress makes a nice touch.
Dinner. Not the food, which was fine, organized in restaurants which had set out long tables for our contingent, the figuranti, the assorted politicos and their assorted consorts who had tagged along, etc. etc. The problem was the hour, which was usually toward 10 PM, which meant finishing toward 1:00 AM. This is a stretch of time which God intended for sleeping, not eating. Or if eating, not to be followed immediately by sleeping, which some of us were on the verge of even as our jaws continued to grind. Hard on the old internals.
But now we’re back, and I’m sorry it didn’t last longer. Of course I would do it all again tomorrow.
Every year since 1975, the organizing committee picks a Sunday in spring and announces the date of the next edition of the Vogalonga, or “long row.” When we heard it was going to be May 31 this year, the first thing most of us thought was “Saharan sun-scorch.” None of us thought “Arctic gale winds,” at least not until we looked out the window that morning.
The poster from 2002.
What it is:
A 30-km (18 miles) course around the islands of the northern lagoon, beginning and starting in the bacino of San Marco, open to any boat propelled by oars.
A chance for people to get down and party, before and after, and occasionally also during.
What it isn’t:
A race. It starts at 9:00 AM with a blast from the cannon on the island of San Giorgio and a glorious ringing of major church bells. It ends when you return to your base camp, wherever you’ve organized it. The reviewing stand at the mouth of the Grand Canal, where your diploma of participation and medal get thrown into your boat, closes at 2:30. But as far as anybody’s concerned, you can get home long after lights-out.
A protest against anything. A foundation-myth has been created over the years, for reasons having more to do with local politics than anything else, that this amateur non-competitive marathon is a protest against the “motondoso,” the infamous wave damage which is destroying the city. Motondoso is a fatal phenomenon which Venetians call the “cancer of Venice” and deserves, more than to be protested against, to be resolved once and for all.
The reason it makes no sense to promote this event as a protest is because:
Each year of the past 35, the motondoso has increased exponentially. If a once-a-year Sunday morning mega-row is supposed to convey serious dissension, something isn’t working.
By now, the number of participating Venetians has shrunk from 99.9% of the total rowers to about 20%. Or, of some 1,600 boats, only around 300 were Venetian; the rest come from everywhere else — the US, Canada, Russia, Australia, all of Europe, even the Comoro Islands.
The Venetians already know everything they need to know about motondoso, including the futility of protesting it, either with oars or guns (though guns haven’t yet been tried. Hm…).
The non-Venetians also have no power to affect anything that happens in Venice, except perhaps the quantity or quality of the garbage they may or may not leave behind. Other than that, it’s pretty clear that if the city government can plug its ears and sing LA-LA-LA-LA when its voting citizens speak up, it’s not going to change everything when a batch of Hungarians or Poles or Kiwis or Comorians lodges a complaint. Which they wouldn’t anyway, because unless some feral taxi should capsize them, they’re probably not going to be too bothered about waves, because motorboats are forbidden along the course. So the rowers have very little chance to experience the glories of motondoso in any case.
One other thing: I’ve experienced a few protests over time, events involving mounted policemen and tear gas and so on. I don’t remember there being people laughing and waving to their friends and taking each other’s pictures and drinking beer. Call it whatever you like; the Vogalonga is essentially one big party, and two large objects like parties and protests just can’t occupy the same space. So much for the protest theory.
We were there this year rowing “San Marco,” the club’s 8-oar gondola. And I’m pretty sure that like everyone else out there when the starting cannon fired at 9:00 AM, we were all thinking, in our various ways, “ohgodohgodohgod.”
Lino admitted when it was all over that he’d had the tiniest hint of a second thought as we started out, but he’s done all 34 and he was determined to make it through the 35th. There aren’t many left who can make that claim, and he was going to do it unless, you know, sheer survival were to become an issue. Not too bad, when you consider that within the space of five months, he’s had a new hip and a pacemaker installed. And that two of the boys aboard had rowed only twice. Ever.
A tremendous wind was blowing, the implacable northeastern blast called the bora, and there were gusts up to 50 miles an hour. Also, the tide was going out, which meant that naturally everyone had to row against it, too. Wind and tide. And it was cold. I’m telling you.
It took us seven hours to finish what normally would have taken four (well, five), but at least we didn’t run into anybody or anything, like channel-marker pilings, though we came close a few times, and we didn’t capsize, which is more than some 30 other boats could claim. The assistance teams stationed around the course had to call for reinforcements to pull people and assorted hulls and oars out of the water.
But we did it, due mainly to Lino, not only because of his strength but even more because of his experience and savvy (“You don’t row with your arms,” he says, “you row with your brain.” The proof of this was seeing the consequences to rowers who didn’t think of how to find some way to make their life out there at least slightly easier, looking for positions that would be more sheltered from the wind, or where the tide would be less strong).
But even with his experience and grit, we, like everybody else out there, had to put everything into it. The wind just never let up, though occasionally it would hurl itself against the right side of the boat, which would slew to the right, so I had to exert a sudden powerful counterstroke to keep the boat from slewing around to the right, usually in front of an onrushing cavalcade of hapless rowers. Lino, astern, exerted his own counterstroke whenever the wind shifted to the left side of the boat. the same when the wind shifted. The others just kept rowing along, like the slaves below decks in Ben-Hur.
But we all had confidence in him, which was the real secret to it all. I can say that because another boat from our club turned back. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it physically; they had no confidence. Mental, not muscles. I want you to remember that — it’s another of those crucial Life Lessons you pick up in a boat. I have quite a list by now.
Just one of the events at the turn into the Cannaregio Canal. Photo by Karol Sibielak.
About those capsized boats. Some accounts make it sound as if the entire course was like the Spanish Armada being blown around England. In fact, the accidents were pretty much limited to a particular category in a particular location:
Low slim sculls of various-size crews. Not really built for the high seas, as it were; not especially capable of having the last word in an argument with waves.
The entrance to the Cannaregio Canal, where the rowers enter Venice and head into the Grand Canal and down to the finish line.
This was the most hazardous place for sculls because it was full of large, heavy, following waves caused by the particular behavior of the tides at that point. And because….
Many rowers didn’t calculate for the rebound of the waves from the nearby embankment. They might have managed to surf along atop one set of inbound waves, but couldn’t deal with the busted-up remains of the same waves coming back at them.
And to think he’d almost done the entire course. I hate that. Photo by Karol Sibielak.
Knowledgeable, or cautious, rowers tended to swing wide before positioning themselves for entry into the canal, thereby avoiding the worst.
I’m explaining all this because you never know when it might be useful to know this.
I took several aspirin and was in bed before 9:00 that night. My last thought was wondering which parts of my body were going to hurt the most the next morning.
Surprisingly, very few. Almost none, really, except for a lovely pair of screaming matched trapezius muscles. And my hands, which felt like lobster claws. Gripping an oar, exerting about a thousand pounds-force per square inch on a stick of wood for much of seven hours, has quite an effect on the old mitts. All those years of piano lessons? No more hope of Rachmaninoff for me.
What really astonishes me is my capacity to remember events like this with something like pleasure. Must be hormones or something, the euphoria of survival. The traps have stopped crying, the hands are back at the keyboard, and I’d say I’m almost ready to do it all again. Like so many things in Erlaworld, it makes no sense.
(Below: In the Cannaregio Canal. We’re smiling because the end is in sight, and because finally we’re going with the tide. I’m the waver wearing the red baseball cap. I have no recollection who I’m waving at.)
Our week in 
