The life-stream of Venice arrives on wheels – her goods and her visitors, even the poor cattle for her municipal slaughter-house: but once at the station or the Piazzale Roma, all this mass of men and material, this daily army, must proceed by water or by foot. Thomas Coryat, before he visited Venice, met an English braggart who claimed to have ‘ridden through Venice in post’: this was, as Coryat indignantly discovered, ‘as gross and palpable a fiction as ever was coyned’. Nobody ever rode through Venice in post, and there are still no proper roads in the city, only footpaths and canals. ‘Streets Full of Water’, Robert Benchley cabled home when he first arrived there, ‘Please Advise’.
The only wheels in Venice proper are on porters’ trollies, or perambulators, or children’s toys, or on the antique bicycles used by a few taciturn knife-sharpeners as the motive force for their grindstones. To grasp what this means, go down to the causeway in the small hours of the morning, and see the convoys of trucks and trailers that wait there in the half-light to be unloaded – scores of them every morning of the year, parked nose to tail, with their drivers sleepy at the wheel, and their bales and packing-cases bursting from the back. Some of this material will be loaded into ships and taken to sea: but most of it must be conveyed into Venice, on barges, rowing-boats, trollies, and even in huge conical baskets on the backs of men. The bridges of the lagoon have linked Venice irrevocably with the mainland: but she remains a wet-bob city still, in which Chateaubriand, who so rashly complained about her wateriness a century and a half ago, would feel no less irritated today.
The central artery of Venice is the Grand Canal, and from that incomparable highway the smaller canals spring like veins, through which the sustenance of the city is pumped daily, like insulin into the system of a diabetic. There are said to be 177 canals, with a total length of twenty-eight miles. They follow old natural water-courses, and meander unpredictably through the city, now wide, fine and splendid, now indescribably tortuous. The Grand Canal is two miles long; it is seventy-six yards wide at its grandest point, and never less than forty; it has a mean depth of about nine feet (thirteen feet at the Rialto bridge, according to the Admiralty Chart); and it is lively with incessant traffic. Other Venetian waterways are infinitely less imposing – they have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub. One canal goes clean under the church of Santo Stefano, and you can take a gondola along it if the tide is low; others are so narrow that only the smallest kind of boat can use them, or so short that there is only just room for their names on the map.
Their usefulness varies according to the tide, and the tide itself varies according to the time of year. The maximum spring tide is probably about seven feet, and the average rise and fall (at the Dogana entrance to the Grand Canal) is just over two feet. These fluctuations drastically alter both the appearance and the efficiency of the city. ‘Like the tide – six hours up and six hours down’, is how a Venetian saying describes the supposedly mercurial character of the citizenry. When the tide is low, the underpinnings of the Venetian houses are revealed in all their green and slimy secrecy. The bottoms of the canals are laid hideously bare, putrescent with rubbish and mud, and some of the smaller waterways almost dry up altogether, so that no boat with a propeller can use them. But when the swift scouring tide sweeps in from the Adriatic, clean, fresh and young, swelling down the Grand Canal and seeping through all its tributaries – then the whole place is richened and rejuvenated, the water surges into the palace doorways, the dead rats, broken dolls and cabbage-stalks are flushed away, and every canal is brimming and busy. Sometimes an exceptional spring tide topples over the edge, flooding the Piazza of St Mark, and people go to their favourite café in gondolas, or hilariously pole their boats about among the colonnades. And once every few centuries the canals freeze over, as you may see in an enchanting picture at the Ca’ Rezzonico, and the Venetians build fires upon the ice, skate to the islands of the lagoon, and impertinently roast their oxen in the middle of the Grand Canal.
The canals have tempered the impact of the causeway. Venice is no longer an island, but her people are still islanders by temperament, for life in roadless Venice is still slow, erratic and sometimes infuriating, and totally unlike existence in any other city on the face of the earth. The Venetian business man can never summon his Alfa. The Venetian urchin cannot leap whistling upon his bicycle. The housewife has to take a boat to market, and the small boy has to walk each morning across a cavalcade of bridges, through a maze of alleyways, to be at school on time (the parents, if of nervous disposition, can often follow his progress half-way across the city, by mounting a powerful telescope on the terrace).
Trade and traffic churn their way heavily through the Venetian watereways, sometimes so busily and so uncomfortably that the whole place feels clogged and constipated with slow movement. The entire organization of one’s private life is governed by the presence of the water. I was once leaning over the Grand Canal with a Venetian acquaintance when she suddenly breathed an extended and despondent sigh, surveyed the canal from one end to the other, and exclaimed: ‘Water! Nothing but water! If only they’d fill the thing up, what a road it would make!’
The canals, some of which have ninth-century origins, have been successfully deepened to allow the passage of larger boats: but they also act as the drains of Venice, and are continually silting themselves up. Until the sixteenth century several rivers flowed through the middle of the lagoon, and they brought so much sediment with them that at one time the canals of Venice were almost choked, and you could walk from the mainland to the city without wetting your feet. The rivers were then diverted to the edges of the lagoon, and today the only mud that enters is sea-mud, to be swept out by the tide again each day. Every year, though, a mountain of excrement falls into the canals, and if you wander about Venice at low tide you will see, sometimes well above the water-line, the orifices by which, in the simplest possible process, most of the city’s sewage leaves its houses. (Many houses nowadays have septic tanks, emptied periodically into barges: but here and there you may still see, jutting from the façades of old palaces, the little closets that used to act as the lavatories of Venice, emptying themselves directly into the water beneath, like the external privies that are attached to the hulls of Arab dhows.)
Tons of muck flows into the canals each day, and gives the crumbling back-quarters of Venice the peculiar stink – half drainage, half rotting stone – that so repels the queasy tourist, but gives the Venetian amateur a perverse and reluctant pleasure. Add to this the dust, vegetable peel, animal matter and ash that pours into every waterway, in defiance of the law, over the balconies and down the back-steps, and it is easy to conceive how thickly the canal-beds are coated with refuse. If you look down from a terrace when the tide is low, you can see an extraordinary variety of rubble and wreckage beneath the water, gleaming with spurious mystery through the green; and it is horrible to observe how squashily the poles go in, when a pile-driver begins its hammering in a canal.
The Venetians have never been much daunted by this substratum. In the fifteenth century they burnt joss-sticks, and ground scents and spices into the soil, to take away the smells: but not long ago even the most fashionable families used to bathe regularly in the Grand Canal, and I am told there was a notice near the Rialto sternly warning passers-by that it was ‘Forbidden To Spit Upon The Swimmers.’ As late as the 1980s ragamuffins and wild young blades of the place, in the sweltering summer evenings, were often to be seen taking wild dives into the murk from bridges and quay-sides, and you might sometimes observe fastidious boatmen, with expressions of unshakeable hygiene, carefully washing out their mugs and basins in the turgid fluid of a backwater.
The civic authorities, though, are necessarily obsessed with sanitation. Much of the foul refuse of Venice, like the mud, is washed away by the tide, without which the city would be uninhabitable – ‘the sea rises and falls there’, as a fifteenth-century visitor said, ‘and cleans out the filth from the secret places’. The rest must be removed by man. For centuries each canal was drained and scoured by hand every twenty years or so (culs-de-sac more often, because the tide does not wash through them): only the Grand Canal escaped – it has only been emptied once, when a fourteenth-century earthquake swallowed its waters in an instant and left it dry for two weeks. For nearly thirty years the job has been neglected, so that many of the canals are severely silted, and the effluences that flow into them are obliged to ooze elsewhere. There was a scheme in the early 1990s to dredge them all by mechanical means, but for myself I shall always remember the old shovelling processes as one of the elemental Venetian experiences.
It used to be an ominous sight for the householder, when a boatload of respectable men in overcoats appeared outside her back door, painting numbers in red paint upon the walls: for it meant that her canal was the next to be drained, exposing the bed in all its horror. A vile miasma would then overcome the quarter. The inhabitants shuttered their windows and hastened about with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and far down in the gulley of the empty waterway, beneath the ornate doorways and marble steps of the palaces, you might see the labourers toiling in the sludge. They had erected a little railway down there, and they stood knee-deep in black glutinous filth, throwing it into tipper-trucks and wheeling it away to waiting barges. Their bodies, their clothes, their faces were all smeared with the stuff, and if you engaged them in conversation their attitude was one of numbed but mordant resignation.
A wonderful variety of boats has been developed by the Venetians over the generations, to make the best use of their unorthodox highways. Their very first chronicler, visiting the wattle villages of their original island settlements, remarked upon the boats tied up outside every house, for all the world as other people kept their horses. Today the ordinary Venetian is not generally a waterman, and looks at the canals with a mixture of pride and profound distrust; but sometimes you see a motor-boat driver, waiting for his patron, who does not bother to moor his craft, but stands on the quayside holding it with a loose rope, precisely as though it were a champing horse, and he a patient groom in a stable-yard. In the Natural History Museum there is a prehistoric canoe, dug up from a marsh in the lagoon, and now preserved in a fossilized condition. It looks almost as old as time itself, but in its blackened silhouette you can clearly recognize the first developing lines of the gondola.
If you take an aircraft over Venice, and fly low above her mottled attics, you will see her canals thick with an endless flow of craft, like little black corpuscles. Every kind of boat navigates the Venetian channels, for every kind of purpose, and many are unique to the place. There is the gondola, of course. There is the sandolo, a smaller but no less dapper boat, also rowed by one standing oarsman, facing forward. There is the vaporetto, which is the water-bus. There is the motoscafo, which is the motor launch. There is the topo, and the trabaccolo, and the cavallina, and the vipera, and the bissona, not to speak of semi-mythical rigs like the barcobestia, or ceremonial barges like the bucintoro, or skiffs from the two old Venetian rowing clubs (the Querini and the Bucintoro), or frisky outboards, or sleek speedboats, or dustbin barges, or parcel-post boats, or excursion launches, or car ferries, or canoes paddled by visiting German students, or inflatables with outboard engines, or yachts, or schooners from Yugoslavia, or naval picket boats, or the smelter’s barge with a billowing furnace on it, or ambulance boats, or hearses, or milk-boats, or even the immaculate humming cruise-ships that sail into the wide canal of Giudecca from Athens, the Levant or the Black Sea.
For a cross-section of this vivacious armada, I like to stand on my corner balcony and watch the boats pass down the Grand Canal. Here (for instance) comes the chugging vaporetto, loaded deep and foaming at the prow: a trim and purposeful little ship, painted green and black. Here is a squat fruit barge, loud with oranges and great banana bunches, a haughty black dog at its prow, a languid leathery brown-skinned man steering with a single bare foot on the tiller. An elderly couple, he in a woollen flapped cap, she in a threadbare khaki jacket, laboriously propel a skiff full of vegetables towards some minor city market. Eight students in a heavy hired motor boat stagger nervously towards the Rialto, singing an unconvincing roundelay. Out of a side-canal there lumbers, with a deafening blare of its horn, a gigantic barge-load of cement; its crew are white with dust, wear hats made of newspaper (like the Walrus’s Carpenter) and periodically pass around the deck the single stump of a cigarette – a puff for each, and two for the steersman. A Coca-Cola barge potters cheerfully by, bottles clinking: its helmsman wears the standard Coca-Cola uniform, as you may see it on delivery trucks from Seattle to Calcutta, and on his Venetian face there has been transplanted, by the alchemy of capitalism, the authentic Middle American smile.
Backwards and forwards across the Grand Canal the ferry gondolas dart daintily, like water-insects, with a neat swirl and decoration at the end of each trip, as they curve skilfully into the landing-stage. The Prefect rides by in his polished launch, all flags and dignity. From the cabin of a taxi there reaches me an agreeable mixture of Havana and Diorissima, as a visiting plutocrat sweeps by towards the Danieli, with his pigskin suitcases piled beside the driver, and his blasé befurred wife in the stern. Outside the Accademia art gallery they are loading an enormous canvas, an orgasm of angels and fleshy limbs, into a sturdy snub-nosed lighter. A couple of executive-style Milanese scud by in a sandolo, rowing earnestly in the Venetian manner – for the rich part-time Venetian, traditional rowing is a substitute for jogging, just as some of the old Venetian boat-types make fashionable yachts. Beyond San Trovaso, splendid between the houses, a liner pulses to its moorings, and behind the dome of the Salute I can see, like the twigs of some exotic conifer, a warship’s intricate radar.
And always somewhere on the Grand Canal, drifting pleasantly with the tide, struggling loftily into the lagoon, tossing at a post or protruding its aristocratic beak between a pair of palaces, there stands a high-prowed, lop-sided, black-painted, brass-embellished gondola, the very soul and symbol of Venice.
The water transport of Venice is easygoing but generally efficient, after fifteen centuries of practice. Traffic regulations are not stringent, and are often genially ignored. The speed limit for boats in the city is nine kilometres an hour – say 5 m.p.h. – but everybody expects you to go a little faster if you can. You should pass a powered boat on its port side, a rowing-boat on its starboard: but in the wide Grand Canal nobody much cares, and anyway the gondola is surrounded by so powerful a mystique, is so obviously the queen of the canals, that when you see her tall sensitive silhouette gliding towards you, why, you merely curtsy and stand aside. Surprisingly few collisions occur, and only rarely will you hear a violent splutter of expletives, trailing away into muttered imprecations, as one barge scrapes another outside your window. The watermen of Venice are robust but tolerant, and do not make difficulties for one another.
The prime passenger carrier of Venice is the water-bus. The first steamboat appeared on the Grand Canal in 1881. She belonged to a French company that had won a municipal concession, and with seven tall-funnelled sister ships she had sailed from the Seine all around the toe of Italy, to begin the first mechanical transport service Venice had ever known. Till then, passengers had either travelled grandly in a gondola, or had taken passage up the canal in a long communal boat, not unlike a Viking long-ship, which two men rowed from the station to St Mark’s (you may see a surviving example in the naval museum at the Arsenal, and a direct descendant is still used by the Giudecca ferry-men). The advent of the Società Vaporetti Omnibus di Venezia plunged the gondoliers into alarm, and they instantly went on strike: but they survived, and on Giudecca, off the Rio della Croce, you may see an ex voto, erected by the ferry-men of that island, thanking the Holy Mother for her kindness in ensuring that they were not entirely ruined by the steamboats.
The steamboat line flourished too, and presently (in the way of successful foreign concessions) it was nationalized, and eventually metamorphosed into the Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano – ACTV for short. It now has more than 100 boats – since 1952 all propelled by diesel or motor engines, though everybody still calls them vaporetti. Except for the very latest vessels, the whole fleet has been successively modified, redesigned, rebuilt, re-engined, so that each craft, like a great cathedral, is the product of generations of loving hands and skills – a steam-cock from one period, a funnel from another, a wheel-house from a third, all embellished and enhanced by some very fine early twentieth-century life-belts. The line has its own shipyards, near the Arsenal: and like the mason’s yard at Chartres, they are always busy.
ACTV runs at a loss, because in the dim Venetian winter only a third of its seats are occupied, and because its fares are artificially low. This is no index of the efficiency of the line, which is impressive (though in the high tourist season Venetians often complain that they cannot get even standing room on their own public transport system). Its services are frequent, fast and reasonably comfortable, and it is only rarely that you see a vaporetto ignominiously towed towards the shipyard by the stripped and gaunt old steamboat that serves as a tug. The crews are sometimes surly, but generally cordial. At each station there is a gauge-mark, a metre high, for the measurement of children and the calculation of half-fares: but it is touching how often the official on duty, with a slight downward pressure of his hand and the distant suspicion of a wink, manages to usher your children beneath it. There is even a beauty to the vaporetti, if you are not inalienably attached to the picturesque; for a fine rollicking spirit compels these little ships, when they plunge into the lagoon on a bright windy morning, wallowing deep and threshing hard, with the spray surging about their stems and the helmsman earnest in his little glass cabin.
And threading a snooty way among these plebs, one step down in the maritime scale but two or three up in price, are the Venetian motor launches. About 100 are private, owned by firms or families – and sometimes, perhaps, taxation being what it is, by both at the same time. Some 150 others are taxis, organized in companies of resounding title – the San Marco, the Serenissima, the Salute. They are fine wooden boats of a design unique to Venice: built in the boatyards of the city (many of them at the eastern end of Giudecca) and often powered by British or American engines. Their tariffs are high. Their décor is ornate, going in for tasselled curtains, embroidered seats, white roof-covers, flags and occasional tables. The newest have an almost racy air to them, while the oldest look like floating Rolls-Royces.
Their drivers, warped by 40 horse-power and the awful vulnerability of their polished mahogany, are often cross and sometimes oddly incompetent. There hangs around them, whether they are taxis or private vehicles, an air of snobbishness and conceit very far from the horny bonhomie of the bargees and the fishermen: and sometimes, when their wash spills arrogantly over the bulwarks of some poor person’s boat (in particular, mine) they remind me of heedless nobles in a doomed and backward kingdom, riding their cruel black horses across a peasant crop.
Different indeed is the character of the gondola, a boat so intimately adapted to the nature of this city that it is difficult to imagine Venice without it. The origin of the craft is said to be Turkish, and certainly there is something about its grace and lofty pose that smacks of the Golden Horn, seraglios and odalisques and scented pashas. It is also clearly related to the boats of Malta: not long ago you could sometimes compare them, for when ships of the British Mediterranean Fleet visited Venice, they usually brought with them a Maltese boatman, to provide cheap transport for the crews, and you might see his bright butterfly-craft bobbing provocatively among the black Venetian boats. What the word ‘gondola’ means nobody quite knows. Some scholars suggest it comes from the Greek κóνδυ, a cup; others derive it from κύμβη, the name the Greeks gave to Charon’s ferry; and a few dauntless anti-romantics plump for a modern Greek word that means, of all things, a mussel. I think it odd that in the modern world the word has had only four applications: to a kind of American railway wagon; to the under-slung cabin of an airship; to the cabin of a ski-lift; to the town carriage of the Venetians.
The gondola is built only in the boatyards of Venice, squeezed away in smoke and litter in the back-canals of the city (some of them will also make you, if you pay them well, exquisite and exact miniatures of the craft). It is constructed of several different woods – oak, walnut, cherry, elm or pine – and is cut to a pernickety design, perfected at last through innumerable modifications. The first gondola was a much less spirited craft, if we can go by the old wood-cuts, its form governed by the clumsy practice of boarding it over the bows: the present model has been so exactly adapted to the needs of the city that there are said to be only two places, even at the lowest tide, where a gondola cannot pass – one near the Fenice Theatre, the other near the church of San Stae.
The gondola is immensely strong. An adventurous eccentric once sailed in one to Trieste, rowed by a crew of eight. I have seen a gondola with its bows chopped clean off in a collision, still confidently afloat; I have seen one, salvaged after months under water, restored to gleaming perfection in a few days; and if ever you have your gondola towed by a motor boat, and race across the lagoon with its prow hoisted high and the salt foam racing by you, the violent but harmless slapping of the water on the boat’s belly will tell you how soundly it is built, like an old Victorian railway engine, or a grandfather clock.
The gondola can also be fast. I once found it extremely difficult, in my outboard motor boat, to keep up with a gondola practising for a regatta beyond San Giorgio. Two gondoliers will effortlessly take a pair of passengers from Venice to Burano, a good six miles, in less than two hours. With a load of four talkative tourists, and an unhurried gondolier, the gondola easily keeps up with a man walking along a canal bank in the city. (All the same, when the Republic presented a gondola to Charles II of England as a wedding present in 1662, and sent a couple of gondoliers to man it, Evelyn reported that it was ‘not comparable for swiftnesse to our common wherries’.)
The modern gondola never has the felze, the little black cabin that used, in poetical eyes anyway, so to intensify its air of suggestive gloom: but it is still thickly carpeted, and fitted with brass sea-horses, cushioned seats, coloured oars and a heavy layer of shiny black varnish – gondolas have been black since the sixteenth century, when the sumptuary laws ordained it, though you may sometimes see one painted a bright blue or a screaming yellow for a regatta. All gondolas are the same, except some rather bigger versions for the fixed ferry runs, and a small toy-like model for racing. Their measurements are standard – length 36 feet, beam 5 feet. They are deliberately lop-sided, to counter the weight of the one-oared rower at the stern, so that if you draw an imaginary line down the centre of the boat, one half is bigger than the other. They have no keel, and they weigh about 1,300 Ib apiece.
At the prow is the ferro, a steel device, often made in the hill-towns of Cadore, with six prongs facing forwards, one prong astern and a trumpet-like blade above. Most people find this emblem infinitely romantic, but Shelley likened it to ‘a nondescript beak of shining steel’, and Coryat described it confusedly as ‘a crooked thing made in the forme of a Dolphin’s tayle, with the fins very artificially represented, and it seemeth to be tinned over’. Nobody really knows what it represents. Some say it is descended from the prows of Roman galleons. Some say it is a judicial axe. Others believe it to reproduce the symbol of a key that appeared on Egyptian funerary boats. The gondoliers themselves have homelier theories. They seem generally agreed that the six forward prongs represent the six districts of Venice, but disagree wildly about the rest. The top is a Doge’s hat/ a Venetian halberd/a lily/the sea/the Rialto bridge. The rear prong is the Piazza/Giudecca/the Doge’s Palace/Cyprus. The strip of metal running down the stem of the boat is sometimes interpreted as the Grand Canal and sometimes as the History of Venice. Now and then, too, in the Venetian manner, a ferro has only five forward prongs instead of six, and this necessitates an agonizing reassessment of the whole problem: and if you ever do settle the symbolism of the thing, you still have to decide its purpose – whether it is for gauging the heights of bridges, whether it balances the boat, or whether it is merely ornamental. All in all, the ferro of a gondola is a controversial emblem: but few sights in Venice, to my mind, are more strangely suggestive than seven or eight of these ancient talismans, curved, rampant and gleaming, riding side by side through the lamplight of the Grand Canal.
A gondola is very expensive to build, and every three weeks or so in summer it must go back to the yards to be scraped of weeds and tarred again. Since the gondoliers are largely unemployed in the winter months, fares are necessarily high, and every now and then the Gondoliers’ Co-operative announces, in a spate of emotional posters, the impending disappearance of the very last gondola from the canals of Venice, unless the municipality agrees to raise the tariff again. In the sixteenth century there were 10,000 gondolas in Venice. Today there are less than 400; but since a ride in one is a prime experience of any Venetian visit, and since they form in themselves one of the great tourist spectacles, they are unlikely to disappear altogether. Even on severely practical grounds, the gondola is still useful to Venetians, for there are several gondola ferries across the Grand Canal, three of them working all night (they have gay little shelters, often charmingly decorated with greeneries and Chinese lanterns, in which off-duty gondoliers picturesquely sprawl the hours away, sometimes engaging in desultory argument, or playing with a communal cat). The gondolier is essential to the spirit and self-esteem of Venice. ‘The gondolier’, says a municipal handbook, ‘cannot demand, even as a tip, a higher fare than is indicated on the notice that must be affixed to his gondola’; but it is wonderful what circumventions he can devise to augment his income, and how expensive his diverse pleasantries somehow prove to be, his odd droppings of curious knowledge, his mastery of saints’ days and Old Customs, his improbable historical anecdotes and his blue persuasive eyes, when at length you reach the railway station.
For myself, I am willing to pay a little extra for the delight of watching his dexterity. At first the gondola may strike you as wasplike and faintly sinister: but soon you will be converted to its style, and recognize it as the most beautiful instrument of transport on earth, except perhaps the jet aircraft. Each example, they say, has a distinct personality of its own, fostered by minute variations of woodwork or fitting, and the gondolier plays upon this delicate soundbox like a virtuoso. Some of his attitudes are very handsome – especially when Carpaccio portrays him, poised in striped tights on a gilded poop, in the days before the sumptuary laws. In particular there is a soft gliding motion, to convey the boat around sharp corners, that reminds me irresistibly of a ski-turn: the feet are placed in a ballet-like position, toes well out; the oar is raised to waist level; the body is twisted lithely in the opposite direction to the turn; and round the gondola spins, with a swing and a swish, always crooked but never ungainly, the gondolier proud and calm upon its stern.
He utters a series of warning cries when he makes a manoeuvre of this sort, throaty and distraught, like the call of an elderly and world-weary sea-bird. These cries so affected Wagner, during his stay in Venice, that they may have suggested to him (so he himself thought) the wail of the shepherd’s pipe at the opening of the third act of Tristan: and they are so truly the cri de coeur of Venice that during the black-outs of the two world wars, pedestrians adopted them too, and sang them out as warnings at awkward street corners. The basic words of the admonition are premi and stali – ‘left’ and ‘right’: but it is difficult to discover precisely how they are used. Ruskin, for example, observes obscurely that ‘if two gondoliers meet under any circumstances which render it a matter of question on which side they should pass each other, the gondolier who has at the moment least power over his boat cries to the other “Premi!” if he wishes the boats to pass with their right-hand sides to each other, and “Stali!” if with their left.’ Other writers are more easily satisfied, and believe that when a gondolier is going left he cries ‘Premi!’ and when he is going right he cries ‘Stali!’ Baedeker, frankly defeated by the whole system, merely records the unpronounceable exclamation ‘A-Oel!’ – which means, he says bathetically, ‘Look out!’ The poet Monkton Milne, in some verses on the problem, says of the gondoliers’ cries:
Oh! they faint on the ear as the lamp on the view,
‘I am passing – premi! – but I stay not for you!’
Nowadays the gondoliers seem to vary their cry. I have often heard the old calls, but generally, it seems to me, the modern gondolier merely shouts ‘Oi!’ (for which Herr Baedeker’s translation remains adequate) and I know one modernist, who, swinging off the Grand Canal into the Rio San Trovaso, habitually raises his fingers to his teeth for a raucous but effective whistle.
It is not at all easy to row a gondola. The reverse stroke of the oar is almost as laborious as the forward stroke, because the blade must be kept below water to keep the bows straight; and skilful manipulation, especially in emergencies, depends upon instant movement of the oar in and out of the complicated row-lock (which looks like a forked stump from a petrified forest). To see this skill at its most advanced, spend ten minutes at one of the Grand Canal traghetto stations, and watch the ferry-men at work. They move in a marvellous unity, two to a gondola, disciplined by some extra-sensory bond, and they bring their boats to the landing-stage with a fine flamboyant flourish, whipping their oars neatly out of the row-locks to act as brakes, and coming alongside with a surge of water and an endearing showmen’s glance towards the audience on the bank.
Boats, boatmanship and boatlore are half the fascination of Venice. Do not suppose, though, that the Venetians never set eyes on a car. You can see them any day, of course, at the Piazzale Roma, or on the resort-island of the Lido, but they sometimes get far nearer St Mark’s. At the Maritime docks, near the Zattere, you may often see cars running about behind the barricades, and sometimes observe a great diesel lorry that has hauled its trailer direct from Munich to the inner fringe of the sea-city. When there is an especially important celebration, the authorities land television and loudspeaker trucks in the Piazza itself, where they sit around in corners, skulking beneath the colonnades and looking distinctly embarrassed. The British took amphibious vehicles to the Riva degli Schiavoni, when they arrived in Venice at the end of the Second World War. Cargoes of cars (and railway wagons, too) often chug across the inner lagoon on ferryboats. And I once looked out of my window to see a big removal truck outside my neighbour’s front door, on the Grand Canal itself: it had been floated there on barges, and its driver was sitting at the steering-wheel, eating a sandwich.