Tourism in Venice

Does tourism make you crazy? Part 1: Quality

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Just another madcap tourist before he jumps off the Rialto Bridge the night of August 14.  No law against being madcap, but there is an ordinance against jumping off bridges here, one dictated by the mayor and one by common sense, but they’re clearly not strong enough. Police don’t seem to be much of a deterrent, and passersby even help out by snapping more pictures.  But a commenter named lagiunela came up with a promising solution (I translate): “White sharks and piranhas in the Grand Canal!”  (Photo: Facebook page goldon)

There are two fundamental problems concerning tourism here: Quality and quantity.  They don’t blend any better than water and wax, but every year their doomed struggle to combine creates quite a spectacle.

Today the subject is “quality.”

We are beginning to reach the end of the Hating Tourists season, and I’ve been ruminating.  I’m astonished to realize that by now even people’s most facepalming antics somehow don’t anger me anymore.  I never thought I’d say that, but reading the headlines has become like watching a sitcom with the sound turned off.  Honey, didn’t we already see this episode?

Perplexity, though, has replaced anger, because I still can’t understand why so many normal 21st-century people, when they find themselves away from home, so often revert to behavior that is usually discouraged in kindergarten.  And it’s not just here — the same things go on elsewhere, in what seems to be a sort of Grand Tour of slobs and boors.  In Rome the other day some young men/old boys were caught splashing and frolicking in the fountain by the Altare della Patria, whose centerpiece is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Yes, we were in the depths of an appalling heat wave, but still.  This would be like someone toasting marshmallows over the Eternal Flame in Arlington Cemetery.  I mean, just don’t.

Hence the question in the title — does tourism make people crazy, or do they already have to be crazy in order to tour in that special rude way they do?  I still can’t decide.

I bring all this up because my recent post about the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (wrongness of) has inspired a number of emails from anguished Venice-loving readers who somehow feel guilty — their word — for being a tourist because by now the word seems to connote only those who behave in an uncouth, ridiculous, repulsive, or even dangerous way.  They’re concerned that simply being a tourist means that they’ll be lumped with the rest of the herd.

Let me reassure you that anybody who can feel guilty for another person’s sins is not related in any way, even geographically, to that other person.  I’m not sure it can be justified even theologically; I’ll have to check the fine print.

Would you have thought of wearing your bathing suit to Piazzale Roma?  Or on the vaporetto on the way?  Is that a shirt she’s carrying?  Why isn’t she wearing it?  Is this real craziness, or just an early warning sign?

To make my point another way, let me ask my conscience-stricken readers (I love you, by the way): Would you string up a hammock between the trees at Sant’ Elena to take a snooze?  Would you set up a camping tent on a fondamenta for the night?  Would you steal a gondola at night (stealing is bad) without even knowing how to row (this is dumb)?  Would you jump off the Rialto Bridge in a pink leotard (jumping is idiotic, as is the leotard, also that it’s pink) on a bet (bets are also stupid)?  Extra points for the danger in this stunt, to yourself and others below you.  No extra points for having a physique that’s worth showing off, though it’s well worth perusing, and points deducted for asking passersby to take your picture.

Would you slide into the Grand Canal in broad daylight and swim out into the traffic and wave happily at the passengers on the passing vaporetto?

Not made up. The headline merely states “Loutish summer.” (Il Gazzettino)

If the answer to any of the above is “Heaven forfend,” then we need to find another word for you, because you’re not what people have come to mean when they talk about tourists.

The city government is flailing around, trying to find a way to prevent all this.  Fines!  Twenty-four hours in jail!  Banishment! (Not made up, though it’s not clear how the offenders would be identified on future visits.)  Locals have been known to call the police when they see people jumping off bridges, and the police have been known not to show up.

It’s like whack-a-mole — the only thing these punishments are likely to accomplish is to assure (maybe?) that that specific individual won’t transgress again.  As for the deterrent quality of punishment, I don’t think it exists if (A) the tourist doesn’t read the Gazzettino and (B) if the tourist believes that, seeing that lightning has struck someone else, they’re somehow exempt from being caught.  Shame?  Embarrassment?  What?

So by now we’re all pretty accustomed to tourists jumping off bridges, but a few days ago one jumped off a vaporetto.  A ticketless 18-year-old American girl traveling up the Grand Canal noticed that the ticket controller was beginning to pass through the crowd, and she realized that not having a ticket meant a 60-euro fine, plus the 7.50 euros for the ticket itself.  Flee!

By which I mean: Jump into the Grand Canal!  Which she did!  Quick thinking!  And expensive thinking!  Because she was almost immediately plucked out of the water by a passing boat, and when the formalities were finished she had paid a fine of 528 euros ($611) — 450 for immersing herself in the canal, plus the ticket price and fine thereof.  So she clearly had the 7.50, and even, if need be, the additional 60.  (For the curious, the Gazzettino made a point of saying that her credit card had survived the saltwater bath.)  But where did she think she was going when she made that big splash?  She said she didn’t know it was forbidden to swim in the Grand Canal.  It needs to be forbidden?  It’s certainly forbidden to create problems for traffic, and that goes for boats who get in the way, too.  Brain tired.

There are several simultaneous Venices at any given moment, and they don’t necessarily have to intersect.  To Venice-lovers: Whether you stay for a day or a month, you’re going to be called a tourist.  But you know there’s a difference between you and the oafs, and Venetians know it too.
This not-atypical Venetian on a summer morning is more interested in the Gazzettino than the swells disembarking from a luxury yacht. And, of course, vice versa. Peaceful coexistence is indeed possible if everybody cooperates.

You don’t even have to do anything drastic to appear a little crazy.  A friend who owns a pizzeria/bar at Sant’ Elena told me the other day that this has been a very unprofitable season so far; plenty of work, but little to show for it.

For instance, “A family of three came and ordered one pizza,” she said, “and a few drinks” (not alcohol, but something fizzy).  “The bill came to 11 euros, and they complained.  They wanted to know why it cost so much.”

People have begun to bring their own beverages to the table, she went on, or ask her to wash their bag of peaches so they can eat them there.  Apart from the rustic quality of these requests, she points out that the law prohibits customers from consuming something not provided by her for the obvious reason that if something were to go wrong (food poisoning, etc.) she could unjustly be blamed.  On a less legalistic level, customers like these make her tired and disheartened, because she’s working and they’re acting as if she’s just standing around asking for money.

But before we leave the topic of “quality,” it should be noted that there must be plenty of times that tourists behave strangely, but not enough to deserve a mention in the news.

A recent example: We now have two tourist apartments in our little snippet of street, and it isn’t easy for the occupants to follow the new scheme for garbage collection.  The apartment owners leave some kind of instructions (it’s not clear how clear they are), but there are  complications in that the normal squishy garbage is collected every morning except Sunday, while the recyclables are on alternate mornings (plastic on Tuesday, paper on Wednesday, etc.).  There are other regulations too but I won’t go into them, because the point isn’t that there are regulations but that some people just find them intolerable.

So we learned from our Venetian neighbor upstairs that this morning he saw one of the current occupants of the facing apartment — for the record, usually rented to French people — walk out the front door with a backpack, peering importantly at his cell phone as he walked away.  Our friend has a window looking out the other side as well, so he watched as the tourist walked to the far end of the dead-end street beyond, opened his backpack, took out a bag of garbage, and left it on the street.

When my friend confronted him (with descriptive gestures) to convey that this was not only not allowed, but was wrong in every way, the man just made similarly descriptive gestures to signify “I don’t understand” with those special gestures which indicate “And I totally don’t care.”  This was probably not an isolated incident, and sirens go off in Venetian brains when foreigners warble “Oh, but Venice lives on tourism!” as if that makes everything okay.

The issue of “quality” was frankly acknowledged in a headline in the Gazzettino: “The chaos is keeping the elite tourists away.” That’s pretty blunt, and to say it must have been painful for the officials who annually express their longing to somehow induce the elite to return to Venice in a more regular, and abundant, manner.

I can’t remember why he was laughing, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t because somebody said “Elite tourist just behind you!”

If there’s one thing I feel safe in saying, it’s that the elite are not attracted by chaos, unless you count the occasional quaint festival of the picturesque peoplefolk, which we seem to be short of (quaintness and peoplefolk).  So, considering that the elite are drastically outnumbered, they’re going to have to renounce Venice and go spend their millions at Portofino or Porto Cervo or Portobuffole’ (not an elite spot, I just threw that in because I love the name), or wherever they go.  But the city officials can’t accept defeat, so every year we read the same wistful statements about how much we miss the elite.  They never write, they never call.

To sum up: To be a “good” tourist you don’t have to care — or even know anything — about Tintoretto or the 76th doge or how to make bigoli in salsa.  You just have to know not to put your suitcase/backpack/house on the seat next to you on the vaporetto, or not to lie down to sunbathe in the middle of Piazza San Marco (or anywhere), and any other shenanigan that cannot be justified to your mother.  If that seems unpleasantly restrictive, and not at all vacationlike, you should go to a real theme park, like Aqualandia, and leave Venice alone.

Therefore, to any visitor with misgivings about being a tourist: People here don’t hold it against you that you’re foreign.  They hold it against you if you behave as if you come from the planet of failed experiments in genetic modification.

In my next post: “Does tourism make you crazy? Quantity”

 

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Tourism in Venice

Venice and Disneyland and us and them and everything

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No tourists will be pictured in this post.

Several thoughtful friends and readers sent me a link to a recent article in the New York Times, just the latest in an endless, repetitive series of articles that bewail the imminent degradation of Venice to the level of Disneyland.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/europe/venice-italy-tourist-invasion.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Me, I have to say that this is a slur on Disneyland, where the behavior and the trash which are inescapable here would never be tolerated in Orlando or Anaheim (or Paris, I guess). I’ve often thought that running Venice like Disneyland might actually be a good thing.  But I realize that the comparison is intended to contrast something “real” (Venice) to something “phony, pretend, not real” (Disneyland).

I thought the New York Times published news, but this is not news!  It must have been a slow news day (remember those?) because they might as well have published a story revealing that water runs downhill.  This subject comes up at least once a year — it’s part of a squad of topics that are as predictable as the tide.  Motondoso is another (one or two blitzes a year, many fines, much outrage, everything goes back to the way it was), as is pickpocketing, and brawls involving assorted illegal vendors, and corrupt city councilors, and matricidal sons with histories of mental illness, and also that the city has no money.

Back to Venice as Disneyland, which is code for “daily pillaging and sacking by barbaric hordes of unspeakable tourists.”  This happens in the summer, of course, which is when tourists go on vacation, and when it’s hot an irresistible desire wells up in your tourist to soak his/her feet in the canals and also to jump off bridges. IT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR, PEOPLE.

I am not excusing it, but I do want to mention a few things which are not the result of outrage fatigue (though there may be some of that).

One is that Venice is not unique, at least in this regard.  The most superficial exploration online reveals that the same imbeciles, or their cretinous relatives, go to Florence and Rome and do stupid things and damage monuments there too. I don’t know if anyone jumps off the Ponte Vecchio, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe this behavior is somehow more objectionable in the Venetian setting than historic cities inland, but that makes no sense.

Clearly these tourists are not visiting irreplaceable cities with incalculable value in the history of the world.  They are on vacation and aren’t at home, their parents are nowhere to be seen and they can drink all they want to.  Even if these tourists were in Ulaanbaatar or Rancho Cucamonga, I would be willing to bet they’d be drinking and doing stupid things.  As for loutish tourists who are adults, I cannot find any excuse for them.  At all. If you don’t know that walking around half-naked and leaving your trash on windowsills is ugly, I can’t help you.

The most obvious solution would be to turn Venice into Singapore-on-the-lagoon.  Let’s place five policemen with truncheons on every corner (hm — how many corners does Venice have? That would be a research project for the next time we’re snowed in). No disrespect meant to Singapore.

But even if all those policemen were to exist, which they don’t, the city is not capable of or interested in dealing with these masses of tourists, regardless of age.  Stories written in high dudgeon come out every single year about the slobs and their antics, but by that time it’s too late.

There have occasionally been neatly dressed squads of multilingual young people — the “decorum” agents —  fanning out around the Piazza San Marco to intervene in cases of nasty and brutish behavior.  But this year they only began their work a few days ago.  We’ve already had two full months of summer and you wait till August to bring them on?  That’s kind of crazy.

There is either a short or a very long story behind the disposition of this wedding festoon, whoever did it.

My second point is that “tourists” is too general a term to be useful. Sure there are plenty of revolting ones, but I see a good number of tourists in via Garibaldi who have undoubtedly come to see the Biennale, and many of them are dressed really well.  Some of them really well.  I like them, so I guess that means they don’t count as “tourists” in the New York Times sense.  And, may I also say, I see plenty of Venetian men and boys (also girls and women, to be fair) in the summer in our zone that look and dress like they’ve just been rescued from the rubble — the same scuzzy tank tops and skeezy shorts and crappy crocs and everything else that makes those terrible tourists so objectionable.  But that’s okay because they’re Us and not Them? Just asking.

What about the tourists who do not mill around in massive droves and provide dramatic photos that make the world shudder, but who stand on the vaporetto dock smack-dab in front of the exit area, making it impossible for all the people on the boat who want to disembark to actually get off? Can we get policemen to deal with them?   Or the suddenly oblivious tourists in the supermarket who leave their just-emptied shopping trolley literally at your feet at the check-out counter?  Do they do that back home in Braunschweig or Rostov-on-Don, or is it just that old Venetian magic that makes them act like they’ve never been out of the house?  Let’s get policemen to deal with them too! My point is that if everybody who comes here wants to behave as if they’d never heard of common sense, much less minimal manners, how many policemen will we need?  And the real question, which will never be answered, is why do they act that way?

On the other hand, let’s look for a minute at the much-maligned day-trippers, who I see at 4:30 PM along the Riva degli Schivoni, huddled, sweating, exhausted, waiting to board the big launch back to wherever they came from, scrunched onto church steps in order to sit for a minute or clustered in nearby calli where they can have at least a shard of shade.  There are plenty of tourists here that I feel really sorry for, because basically the city has given them a jumbo-sized “Just suck it up!”

I act like I’ve read the article, but I just skimmed it with half-closed eyes because these articles are always sprinkled with misstatements and half-truths, and drone on about the same problems which are never resolved, thereby rendering the droning pretty much useless.  One such half- (actually quarter-) truth is found in the caption of the Times’s photo showing the young woman with the police.  It states with refreshing fervor that the feast of the Redentore is “one weekend of the year when Venetians take back their city.”  Well, not really.  Before a journalist starts patting the Venetians on the back for somehow briefly escaping the clutches of all those tourists, he or she should know that about 90 percent of the festivizers are not Venetian.

Nope, sorry.  They might be Italian, and many are from the Veneto, but they’re still tourists; some come up the lagoon from Pellestrina and Chioggia in their big fishing boats, but most of the big motorboats are carrying people from the hinterland who come down the rivers from Padova and Treviso and all around the lagoon but who are definitely not Venetians.

Furthermore, the past few years has seen a terrific increase in enormous party boats which provide the ride, dinner, and deafening disco music to hundreds of passengers.  I don’t know who they are, but I’m pretty sure they’re not Venetians.  Some dauntless Venetians are still willing to risk their lives in their smaller boats, with or without motors, because it’s lovely to float around for the fireworks, but they know that after the grand finale this flotilla of hundreds-of-horsepower motorboats of all sizes will head out at high speed, in the dark, driven by people who have been drinking who pretty much don’t know the area.

Excuse me for going on about this, but that photo caption needed correction. In our neighborhood, and at Sant’ Elena, many Venetians now eat the Redentore dinner at home, or on tables set up outside, then watch the fireworks from the fondamenta.  I don’t think that qualifies as “taking back” their city.  We used to love to go out in our boat, but we can’t anymore because we want to survive the night which has been taken away from us by non-Venetians.  And by the look of it, it’s never coming back. Who am I supposed to blame this time?

So people want to come to Venice? They can’t all be crazy.

 

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Problems, Tourism in Venice, Uncategorized

O Audrey, where art thou?

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I want everyone to stop for a moment and think of Audrey Hepburn.  Yes, one of the most divine women ever to set foot on earth.  Just writing her name is like inhaling a waft of moonflowers and heliotrope from the Isles of the Blest.

Now I want you to imagine her — just for a second, because this hurts — becoming old, neglected, and feeble.  Not demented, just left to deteriorate at random.  You know: The soup stain on the blouse, the dirty hair, the shuffly slippers instead of shoes, the drooping slip, the general all-purpose “Just don’t care anymore, can’t be bothered, nothing matters anyway.  What pile of unopened bills on the kitchen floor?  What half-eaten cans of tuna in the laundry basket? A mouse in the refrigerator?  Is it alive?”

Now I want you to stop for a moment and think of Venice.

Now put the two pictures together.  Not good.  Not good at all.

I hinted in my last post at a certain laissez-faire atmosphere which has taken over what I still am determined to consider the Audrey Hepburn of cities.  Over the years, signs of distressing degradation have been noticed, and even reported to the authorities — each sign existing in its own little capsule in the municipal consciousness, just as each sign of personal neglect can be passed over by benevolent or apathetic eyes.  Each, of course, explained or excused because no ghe xe schei.

Then suddenly the total of them all reveals itself as appalling.

Welcome to the most beautiful city in the world. Enjoy your day. (Photo: Gazzettino).
Most beautiful city in the world, the pool at the community center, your cousin’s back yard — what’s the difference?  (Photo: Gazzettino).

This revelation seems to have hit a lot of people lately, if the Gazzettino is anything to go by.  And yes, great lamentations continue to rise from the Venetians concerning the tourists.  But if tourists are the perpetrators, the municipal non-authorities are the enablers.

First, the tourists.  When I use the word, I’m not referring to their quantity, which is distressing though not difficult to understand, but their quality, which utterly bewilders me.

Yes, of course there are millions of wonderful tourists here all the time.  And I don’t want to get into an arm-wrestling match over percentages, or what constitutes “quality tourism,” or the God-given universal human right to come to Venice whenever you want.

But I have to say that I do not perceive a human right to come to Venice to DO whatever you want.

I still do not understand this. Do you just lie down in front of the church in your own town? Do the tourists imagine they're invisible, or do they imagine all the people around them are invisible? I must ask one someday.
I still do not understand this. Do you just lie down in front of the church in your own town? Do the tourists imagine they’re invisible, or do they imagine all the people around them are invisible? I must ask one someday.

Every few days some novel behavior appears which the star of the story inexplicably considers just fine, behavior which in their own city is probably regarded as offensive and possibly also illegal.  Here the same behavior is also regarded as offensive, and is often illegal, and yet Venice, especially in the summer, and especially this summer, seems to attract a type of tourist who thinks that former Queen of the Seas is more fun than the locally-much-reviled Disneyland, although the comparison isn’t very useful considering that the Magic Kingdom is more strictly run than your average penitentiary.  I mean that as a compliment.

Graffiti-sprayers and sun-bathers in the Piazza San Marco are no longer any special big deal, repulsive as they are.  But this year has kicked it all up a notch.  There was the Indian family which hunkered down in the Piazza San Marco to cook lunch on a camp stove. The man who decided to beat the heat by stripping down to his underwear, blithely wandering the streets in his Jockey shorts, or the European equivalent thereof.

A young couple, all tuckered out, who spread their towels on the street in a nice patch of shade and lay down to sleep.  A man who decided to scale the Doge’s Palace, demonstrating a free-climbing skill that would have been admirable if he hadn’t been clinging to pieces of marble and statues hundreds of years old.

A tightrope walker who strung his cord between two lampposts along the Zattere.  Carnal knowledge on the Scalzi bridge.

Do these people think that it’s Carnival here all year?  Did they come all the way to Venice just to do this, or are they merely responding to some sudden impulse?  Or do they intuit, by some imperceptible herd sensitivity, that Venice has become something like homeroom with no teacher, all the time?

Nature calls, and hears no echo in the reptilian-complex area of their brains where dwells some primitive memory of childhood instruction. (Corriere del Veneto)
Nature calls, and hears no echo in the reptilian-complex area of their brains where dwells some primitive memory of childhood instruction. (Corriere del Veneto)

Now comes the latest: Two male visitors in the Piazza San Marco whose bursting bladders brooked no delay.  So they relieved themselves into a garbage can.  As in many of the above-noted cases, it was broad daylight.

Much of this revolting behavior is something you’d expect — or not be surprised — to see on the Bowery, Skid Row, the Tenderloin, or whatever is the current term for the devastated section of your city.

But this is not them.  Nor is it — despite the sun and water and boats — Panama City Beach on Spring Break.

This is a three-square-mile World Heritage Site.  It’s more like the Louvre, with sun and water and boats.

So if whatever you’re about to do would be disgusting or ridiculous or rude in the Louvre — or even in Horse Hoof, Kansas, or especially in the much-maligned Disneyland — it would be likewise here.

Maybe Venice isn't a city. Maybe it's some hydroponic social-experiment where the Id is king. This romantic interlude is on the Scalzi bridge, by the railway station, a place I'd never have associated with overwhelming "From Here to Eternity"urges. (Corriere del Veneto)
Maybe Venice isn’t a city. Maybe it’s some hydroponic social experiment where the Id is king. This romantic interlude is on the Scalzi bridge, by the railway station, a place I’d never have associated with overwhelming “From Here to Eternity” urges. (Corriere del Veneto)

So much for the tourists.

Yet, as the always perceptive Davide Scalzotto noted in a brief essay in the Gazzettino, if the city has begun to look like a slum (I paraphrase), people will act as if it’s a slum.  I believe there are important studies which support this statement.  I won’t start a list here of the dreadful deterioration to be seen just about anywhere because it’s too depressing and also because it would make anybody want to scream.

Hardly any money has been spent over the past decade or more on maintenance, let alone improvement, and now we know why.  It’s because the city fathers were pulling out the money for MOSE through virtual pneumatic tubes for their own purposes.  And the state funds that come via the Special Law for Venice, which was instituted in 1973 specifically to finance measures to protect the city and its environment, are always too little, and too late.

Are there police?  Of course, but not nearly enough.  Are there laws?  Of course, but probably too many.  Considering that it’s impossible to enforce them all, they get enforced on an as-needed basis.  No wonder the once Most Serene Republic has come to resemble Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.

But let’s say somebody gets arrested — it does happen, though it isn’t always, or even usually, a tourist.  Not long ago, we read about a crippled beggar well-known around the crowded streets of Venice and the beaches of Jesolo, just across the lagoon.  Hold your sympathy.  The story had to do with the fact that at quittin’ time the homeless, 47-year-old Romanian straightened up, brushed himself off, and briskly walked toward wherever he was going that night. When an angry citizen’s photograph was published — the lame walk?  The blind see?  Is it, in fact, a miracle? — the beggar was hauled in and charged with…. what?  Offending public decency?  Exploiting the public’s natural compassion?  Faking it?  What crime, exactly, had he committed?

None.  The judge ruled that it is not against the law to beg, even if in the process you callously counterfeit a pitiful condition to earn lucrative sympathy.  The mendicant paid an administrative fine, and the judge gave him his cane back.

So: There is no law that forbids a person to present himself as something he is not.  I guess I already knew that. We had a mayor who presented himself as honest, but he was not.  He was sentenced to four months of house arrest, but his crime wasn’t having pretended to be honest, but for having taken bribes.  Ergo, why should somebody be punished for pretending to be a cripple, staggering along, doubled over, supported only by his trembling cane?

So we could all start faking it and still be fine.  I know people who pretend to be intelligent, or caring, or lots of things they’re not.  I could walk around pretending I was Elaine Stritch and I’d never be arrested, at least not until I started belting out “I’m Still Here” on the street.

Here is the YouTube link:  http://youtu.be/CFzmVYNItjU

I started with Audrey and I’ve ended up with Elaine.  My God: It’s the story of Venice in two names.  Maybe “I’m Still Here” ought to be the new national anthem of Venice.

Except that it shouldn’t have to.

My next post, barring some unforeseen calamity, will take us back to happier topics.  I’ve had more than I can take of all this tsuris.

 

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Boatworld, Tourism in Venice

How not to get gondoliered

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It pains me to write this, but I hope that doing so will serve some useful purpose.

Gondoliers are arguably the symbol of Venice, and as such could be expected to evince a sense of the importance of same.  That’s just my opinion.

What is not opinion, but fact, is that they are independent, masters of their own boats, lords of their lives, and — yes — of their money.  I mean, of your money.

I know a good number of gondoliers and can attest that many are fine, professional people and first-rate ambassadors for their amazing city.  Among other things, they’re often the first to fish tourists out of the canals when the said tourists have misjudged the slipperiness of the algae on that stone step, or to have miscalculated other maneuvers.

You can see the required card impaled by the small flag on the prow. Seeing does not mean reading.

Then there are the others. There are some that easily inspire apprehension, who resemble inmates out on a work-release program, with boats to match.  But don’t be distracted by the externals, because how a gondolier behaves depends on many and easily shifting factors apart from his housekeeping and personal care, and you don’t want to find yourself in the middle when the shifting is going on.

I wouldn’t bring it up at all, but there has been a recent situation here, amply reported in the Gazzettino, in which a gondolier charged a Russian couple 400 euros ($496) for a spin in his gondola that took less than an hour.  You could probably justify that price if you included a bottle of the Shipwrecked 1907 Heidsieck champagne poured into Baccarat flutes while the gondolier rowed you to Trieste singing the “Improvviso” from Andrea Chenier.

Then again, he could skip all that and just ask for the dough.  Which he did.

As you see by the rates standardized by the Ente Gondola, the gondoliers’ sort-of governing body, he should have asked 80 euros, or 100 euros, depending on the time of day.

But no.

People tend to be intimidated by gondoliers.  People need to get past that.  The Ente Gondola has tried to help, by insisting that the gondoliers exhibit the price scale.  Most gondoliers have done so, by attaching a piece of plastificated paper 5 1/2 inches square to the prow of their boat — a place a potential passenger isn’t likely to approach, even if armed with the necessary magnifying glass to read the type.

This card measures 5 1/2 inches square.

And it’s printed on both sides, so you’d have to turn it over to get the complete information.

Let’s move on to the happy ending: The Russian couple registered a complaint and got their money back, with a promise from the Ente Gondola of a free ride next time.  To which I’m pretty sure they replied “There’s not going to be a next time.”  It doesn’t sound better in Russian.

So here’s the simplest solution.  Let’s say that you and a gondolier have begun to converse.   Whether you approached him or vice versa, you’re talking about money.

He mentions a figure that doesn’t sound like what is printed on the Ente Gondola’s site.  So you say, “Would you please show me the rates printed on the card on your gondola?”

If he doesn’t have the card on his gondola, you move on.  If he has it but can’t explain why the rate he quoted you doesn’t match what’s printed, you move on. No need for complicated discussions or heated words.  It’s a big world, and there will always be another gondolier.

 

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