by Jan Morris
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, t
o 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 word
s 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:
