Without warning, I felt the sob-of-family-happiness-welling-up-during-an-expensive-vacation feeling. We had gone for the gondola. It wasn’t a tritely touristic boat, though its steel spaghetti-fork of a ferro intrudes in every etching; it was an ancient and noble boat, which summed up many lost beautiful things, and Venice itself seemed worth all the guidebooked fuss. Any means of transportation that could produce that much joy in fifty minutes, for a cost of a little over a hundred dollars, including tip, deserved further study.
In the Palladian library at San Giorgio Maggiore I read “The Evolution of the Venetian Gondola,” by G. B. Rubin de Cervin, which attributes the boat’s un-Palladian asymmetry — its “deviation from the curvature of the central line”—to the increasing use of one rower, rather than two, in the poorer times that followed Napoleon’s subjugation of the Venetian Republic. And I read “The Energy Cost of the Venetian Rowing Stroke,” in Carlo Donatelli’s personable and quaintly translated book The Gondola: An Extraordinary Naval Architecture: Donatelli’s dynamometer readings and measurements of oxygen consumption seem to suggest, remarkably, that you expend the same amount of energy rowing a loaded gondola at a speed of two miles an hour as you would walking empty-handed on flat ground at the same speed. (Which explains how gondoliers can work fifteen-hour days during the busy season.) I read also Goethe’s description of his father’s toy gondola, which first made him want to visit Venice and record his adventures there, thus luring south a poetical crowd of Romantic and Victorian followers. And I learned that plastic model gondolas, probably identical to the one my father gave us, had a vogue in Germany in the fifties, where they went on top of television sets and were called rauchverzehren, which means “smoke-eaters,” because their lights supposedly neutralized the effects of cigarette smoke.
We went on several more gondola rides. On a very windy morning, we got on a boat manned by a square-jawed regatta champion named Franco Grossi, a seventh-generation oarsman and a practitioner of Eastern medicine, to whom colleagues went for help with the sort of ailments (e.g., tennis elbow and back pain) that afflict rowers. I told him I wanted to use the gondola the way people would have used it in the ninteenth century, simply as a means of getting somewhere. Could he take us to the Ponte dei Pugni, or Bridge of Fists, where according to the Blue Guide there was an English-language bookstore? Grossi said nobody did that sort of thing anymore in a gondola — went from Ponte A to Ponte B. Everyone went in loops and ended up where they started. “But I like doing crazy things,” he said. He untied the ropes and we pushed back, as a passenger plane does, from his mooring near the Doge’s Palace. The gondola slots are defined by many thin twiglike sticks projecting vertically from the water; they give the hotel-crowded shoreline the appearance of fronting on a reedy marsh. We bobbed along for a while, and then, as we got closer to the mouth of the Grand Canal, there was a major gust of wind that made fine crinkles on the top of all the swells. The gust, combined with some large heaves from a ferry, made us suddenly slide around sideways, facing the Church of the Salute. I heard a “Wow!” behind me and thought Grossi had fallen off. But he hadn’t. “There was a little problem back there,” he conceded a few minutes later. The gondola is flat-bottomed, he said, and the wind, under certain rare conditions, can get under it and flip it over.
Things were quieter once we entered the San Trovaso canal and slid past a boatyard, or squero, where there are often three or four gondolas turned on their sides like dozing dugongs, having their hulls sanded down and repainted. Then we turned right on All-Saint’s Canal, and right again on the Canal of Lawyers, and Grossi pointed out the center of gondola history — the shop of the Brothers Tramontin. Domenico (El Grando) Tramontin perfected the modern gondola’s asymmetries in the 1880s, and Grossi was of the opinion that the Brothers Tramontin continue to make the best and longest-lived gondolas. But they cost ten million lire more than anyone else’s, Grossi said. His own boat is the work of “Nino” Giuponi, another squerarolo of legend, now retired. Giuponi was more of an experimenter than the later Tramontins; he introduced the use of plywood in some of his boats, which some disparage, although it can help the hull keep its shape in the presence of constant motorwaves.
Finally we reached the Bridge of Fists. The bookstore was gone. Its old shelves were holding lettuces and radishes, overflow from the highly successful produce barge that moors there. But it didn’t matter. We bought some spinach and went home — altogether a delightful trip.
Then, in my son’s sleepy company, I took a ride with a pilot named Marco, who worked at the gondola station at the Church of the Salute and looked like Billy Crystal. When I asked Marco what the most difficult thing was about being a gondolier, he thought for a moment. “The other gondoliers,” he said. “Mostly the old gondoliers. They have small brains, believe me.” As we passed the Church of San Trovaso, where there is an altar for boatbuilders with a gondola carved into it, Marco got a call on his portable phone. He set up a rendezvous while ducking under a bridge. We went by Tramontin’s boatyard, deserted now except for a small brown dog sniffing some new sawdust. We got onto the subject of boat maintenance. It’s important, Marco said, to wash your boat for half an hour every day. “It’s what my father teach to me, when I was young. Every day. With new water, not salt water. New water the gondola, then you dry the gondola.”
“Some gondoliers seem very good—” I began to say.
Marco misheard the word “seem” and cut in. “Believe me, sir,” Marco said with a self-deprecating laugh, “but I have a horrible voice. Better not to sing, just enjoy the nice weather.” In his father’s time, twenty or thirty years ago, a family would hire a gondola for the whole day, he said. I asked how much it would cost to do that now. “I think eight hundred thousand lire.”
That’s a pretty steep day rate, but (I said to myself) one total-immersion gondolar day — with a micro-cruise budget of 450 dollars — would give a visitor new to Venice a comprehensive oar’s-eye notion of the several neighborhoods and many churches. And each bought ride would have a political component: it would be an act of defiance against the water taxis and other arriviste wave-generators, a vote for a quieter city, something more than mere tourism. Why not skip the twelfth or fifteenth absurdly expensive meal in which three kinds of pale shellfish are mingled with a noodle of little distinction and instead buy eight dollars’ worth of cheese and olives and whatnot at the local salumeria and eat out at twilight in the very kind of boat that kings and popes and moody poets would have ridden in?