Next door to the Tramontin brothers’ squero is a gondola shop run by Daniele Bonaldo. A twenty-four-year-old American anthropology student named Thomas Price recently built a life-size gondola there with the help of a Watson Fellowship. Bonaldo is childless and says he’s tired of building boats, so he agreed to teach the art to Price. On the tenth of May I went to a party at Bonaldo’s place to celebrate “The Launching of the First American Gondola.” Price’s boat looked authentic — black, with a dark-red hull and a small, tasteful, delicately rendered American flag, breeze-ruffled, carved into one of the decorative elements by an itinerant artisan. Price has built sailboats and rowboats in Maine, but he was attracted to the gondola, he told me, because there are many unusual things about it. Not only is it asymmetrical and rowed in a standing position — but also its components are bent into shape by brushing them with water over a fire of marsh reeds (a blowtorch will also work and is handier in the winter), and they are assembled without paper plans, by cutting the pieces in accordance with a wooden template, the cantier. The prosecco that Price poured on the prow to christen the boat mixed with the sun-warmed and not-completely-cured black lacquer to produce an inspiring Saturday-morning smell. Price told me that he would like his gondola to be rowed on the canals of Venice, but it may be that a couple of entrepreneurs in Maine buy it for a novelty riverboat service there: it’s Bonaldo’s boat to sell.
Before I left the party I talked to Price’s sister, Anne. She was living in Mestre, making a living playing North Carolina fiddle music on the steps of Venetian churches, which is forbidden without a busker’s license. I asked her if she had ever ridden in a gondola. One time she was walking across a bridge, she said, and a young, handsome gondolier with long blond hair offered her a free ride. She said okay. They went down a sludgy canal by a conservatory, where she could hear pianos and clarinets, and then out onto the Grand Canal. The whole time the gondolier was saying how sorry he was that she had no one to be kissing while she was riding the gondola. I asked her if the two of them had hit it off. “We hit it off,” she said, “but I maintained my distance. I see him from time to time. It’s like a musical skill to be able to row a gondola. When I see gondoliers just standing all day on bridges, saying Gondola, gondola, waiting, it’s like they’re begging. It’s so similar to me when I play violin on the street, waiting for somebody to stop and listen.” Her gondolier’s name was Eros.
Eros the Oarboy is as familiar today as he was in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Giovanni the gondolier is “devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted to cargoes of ladies in the past.” At night there is, I have noticed, a considerable amount of giggly public gondolier-kissing in the city by groups of foreign women carrying bottles of wine. My wife made up a song: Come into my gondola, I’m going to fondle ya. Once, in the middle of the Grand Canal at ten o’clock in the evening, we passed a gondola that was sitting motionless on the water with two women and two stripe-shirted men in close converse within; one of the men greeted our rower and called out (my wife translated for me), “How do you say ‘double bed’ in Spanish?”
All this is as it should be. My minor complaint is just that there is no privacy available to the passengers of these boats — privacy not to go hog wild, necessarily, but simply to talk without constraint. You are compelled to take the waters in a convertible. The felze (wooden winter cabin) and tendalin (canvas summer hood) were renounced forty or fifty years ago — too time-consuming to set up, and unnecessary, it was thought, for the demands of tourism. Unless these traditional enclosures are revived, the conventional tender moment on the water will be forever inhibited by the steady oar-plying and tour-guiding going on abaft. You tentatively take the spousal hand, and then hear, from behind, “This is Goethe house. Goethe lived in this house.” All potential romance has been realigned in favor of the presiding gondolier himself. Male passengers are adjuncts, balding lumps of flesh with wallets.
The one real love story I know between a gondolier and a straniéra is the one between Bruno Palmarin, the profusely mustached hereditary gondolier who rowed at our wedding, and Susan Nickerson, an American mosaicist. Susie grew up in Long Island, the daughter of two judges. She came to Venice in 1972 after art school to study mosaic-making. Late in December, on her birthday, she went alone to Torcello. The sacristan unlocked the church for her; she was the only person there. Then she got a boat back to Venice and went to an antique store where she knew some people. She told them it was her birthday, and they bought a bottle of spumanti to celebrate. Just then Bruno Palmarin came by — a big, polite man carrying two baby rabbits in a cage. (They were a Christmas present for his niece and nephew.) Bruno looked a little like the bust of the Emperor Constantine, Susie thought: the same large, spiritual eyes. Later she found out he was a gondolier.
When Bruno finished work for the day, he would hitch his gondola like a horse not far from Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo (Bruno’s father was Peggy Guggenheim’s gondolier for a time), in the little canal where Susie shared a mosaic studio with a Russian woman. He would peek in the little window that was in the door and greet her; she would scoop away the wet cement from her work-in-progress (she was using pieces of old mirror-glass a lot then) and come out with him. In time Susie learned to row herself, and they rowed a lot — to the Rialto to shop, to entertain dinner guests, to carry Susie’s heavy mosaics to her show. They, together with an American man and Bruno’s brother Ambrogio (who was a gondolier until elbow problems forced him to become a businessman), competed in the first Vogalonga in 1975—the Vogalonga being a noncompetitive marathon open to any kind of international oar-powered craft. “She should be home washing the dishes!” some people called from the shore (in Italian). Others called out, “Viva la donna!”
They got married in Venice’s City Hall in 1978; their first child, Giacomo, learned the basics of rowing when he was two, by holding a broom and standing in a wooden cradle that Bruno had built for him. Giacomo is now eighteen; he is not sure whether he wants to be a trumpet player, or a gondolier, or both. Last year he won the youth-division Regata Storica and every other race he entered. I asked him if he had any rowing tips. “You have to make the boat always go forwards and not go back,” he said. “The oar has to come in strong to come out sweetly and then go back fast.” Bruno is not a regatta-racer himself, but Giacomo admires his father’s virtuosity. “Everybody can go fast, if you train,” he said, “but not everybody can go fast in the canals.”
Bruno has the ferri, the prow and stern ornaments, of various relatives mounted on the walls and ceilings of their house. He recently spent three winters renovating an ornately filigreed felze made around the turn of the century, the sort of thing that Henry James or William Dean Howells would have cruised around in. (“I don’t know where, on the lagoon, my gondolier took me,” James wrote; “we floated aimlessly and with slow rare strokes.”) Bruno has a collection of old gondola components he keeps in a low-ceilinged storage room near where he grew up, in the Dorsoduro. (His family moved to the Giudecca in 1960, after canal water began flooding into Bruno’s room.) On the wall are portraits of gondolier relatives, old paintings of regatta champions, and a photograph of Susie and him leaving City Hall on their wedding day. The radio is always softly playing. “I like old things, anyway,” he said as he uncovered more and more of his collection of cloth-shrouded gondoliana. He owns two gondolas — the one that he rowed for our wedding (which seemed plenty fancy to us at the time), and a budget-busting wedding sloop that he commissioned Tramontin to make for him in 1990. Its stern-piece is an elegant twist of steel curving around a fernlike decorative whorl incised with the Palmarin coat of arms and the initials “PB.” (“Handmade by a friend of mine,” Bruno said.) The chairs are the ones his uncle used on his wedding gondola, re-gilded; Susie made the embroidered pillows and found the putti-and-flower pattern that the wood-carver chipped into the top panels. On the prow there is a small gold man holding a bottle of wine that Bruno had cast from a statue on an old clock he owns — the figure serves, as Bruno sees it, as the hostly Bacchus, saluting all passenger-guests and wishing them a good journey in his boat. Bruno hesitates to say how much it all cost: “Thirty thousand dollars would not be enough,” he says. The boat’s name is Aurelia Stephanie, after his daughter.