"Venezia" is Italian for Boats

“Venezia” is Italian for “Boats”

©2017 John P Hewitt

Venice has enough fine art to cause Rick Steves fans, PBS “viewers like you,” and any random assortment of middlebrows to swoon. Look around and an iconic sight is sure to hit you in the face: Piazza San Marco, The Campanile, Basilica San Marco, Palazzo Ducale, Canale Grande, a million other not-so-grand but oh-so-cute canals, and antique buildings by the mile. Signs of the city’s former wealth and power abound in its magnificent palazzi and churches, edifices that stroked their owners’ egos and God’s as well. And bridges: The Rialto Bridge, the Academia Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs, the quaint bridge you have to cross to get to your hotel, and dozens of others you will cross and soon cross again because you are lost, and you left your copy of Calli, Campielli, e Canali back in Ohio. All of that stuff is good stuff, but it doesn’t get to the heart and soul of what Venice is about.

Venice is about boats. All sorts of boats, starting with its famed gondolas. A Venetian gondola is an impressive vessel, with its gracefully shaped wooden hull finished in gleaming ebony and its impressively ornamented upswept bow. Its figurehead, the ferro, looks like a shiny metal silhouette of a pointy papal hat with six horizontal bars resembling a coarse comb arranged below it, symbolizing the six administrative areas into which Venice was once divided. Gondolas come with plush cushions and chairs for the guests, and a gondolier with a gondolier’s hat who pilots the craft with a single oar pivoted on a tall oarlock and probably also sings a song. You haven’t experienced cultural dissonance until you’ve heard a gondolier pass under your hotel window late at night singing “Arividerci Roma” or “O Solo Mio.” This is Venice, for crying out loud. You are going to leave your heart here, not in Rome or Naples! Tourists swarm from their cruise ships and mainland hotels to have a gondola ride, and you can’t blame them. The cost of a gondola ride? Eighty to a hundred Euro, give or take. A picture of you and your brood with a gondolier in his broad-brimmed hat framed with the Rialto bridge in the background? Priceless, at least until you get your bank statement.

Venice also boasts beautiful, posh water taxis of polished wood and gleaming brass trim that move the well-heeled (or those who have saved their pennies) from place to place – to a fancy hotel, for example, a costly restaurant, or to and from the airport. A Venetian water taxi resembles the taxi you can find in any American city about the same way a Mercedes resembles a Yugo. You don’t have to worry about who last sat in the seat or what they did in it. A half-hour ride to the airport might cost 80 to 100 Euro, but it will take you door to door. Imagine the thrill of standing in the front with the driver as you move swiftly up the Grand Canal and across the lagoon to your private jet at Marco Polo Airport, leaving lesser craft or people floundering in your wake. Or travel to Murano to buy some expensive Murano glass. Don’t even think about Uber; there is no water-borne Uber in Venice, and any attempt to start one would meet an angry, blockading flotilla of water taxis.

For those fated to gaze at the world from the middle or the bottom rungs of the ladder, or through the windows of mass public transportation, there are boats that perform the function of streetcars and busses: the Aliliguna line from the airport to the city and the vaporetti that move up and down the Grand Canal and around the perimeter of the city proper and also to the peripheral islands in the lagoon. These craft vary somewhat in size and shape, but in a functional sense they resemble busses. Touch your ticket to the sensor before you go up the ramp to the dock, wait for disembarking passengers to clear, step onto the vaporetto, and find a place to stand or sit. On the Aliliguna line from the airport to the city you won’t have the option of standing outside – considerable space near the entrance is taken up by luggage and you must go forward or aft to a seat. On the vaporetti, you can go inside to sit down, if there’s space, or stand cheek to jowl with other tourists in the open area in the middle of the boat and watch Venice go by. Vaporetti resemble busses in another respect: not much effort is devoted to keeping the windows clear enough to see out of them.

Did I mention there are a lot of boats in Venice? There are a lot of boats in Venice. Not just the boats that deliver people from one place to another, but boats that deliver anything that wants to be delivered from here to there, or there to here. To wit: beer, building materials, paper towels, Amazon packages, sick people, trash, and anything else you can imagine. In my neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio a Budweiser truck delivers its load to the local taverns; the Lowe’s truck comes down the street every so often to deliver sheetrock to a house remodeling project; eighteen wheelers of all kinds stream up and down the interstate; UPS and FedEx make daily deliveries; the trash is collected weekly in a big shiny yellow truck, and recyclables every other week in another truck; people commute to and from work; and police cars, fire engines, and ambulances use their sirens to encourage slow-witted drivers to get out of their way. All of these vehicles have at least four wheels and run on streets that are more or less paved. What if there were no streets or self-propelled vehicles?

In Venice, vehicles with wheels and motors are quarantined to a small area near the end of the causeway that joins the city to the mainland. Everything that gets done by car and truck in Columbus gets done by boat in Venice. Without exception, so far as I am aware. Look in any canal, from the smallest to the Grand Canal or the Giudecca Canal and the lagoon itself and you will find boats carrying the burdens of daily work. Need some beer or paper towels or canned goods for your store? A boat will deliver goods to your dock, if you have one, otherwise to the closest dock. From there, a worker will load your stuff onto a hand cart and deliver it to your door. Need some lumber or sheetrock to restore your 400-year-old building? A boat will deliver it as close to you as possible, and then probably use the crane it carries to lift it off the boat and onto a cart to take it to you. Or a worker will carry it piece by piece down a narrow calle to your door. Expecting an Amazon package? Perhaps it will be a postal worker who brings it in a cart, or the DHL boat servicing your area. Garbage piling up? Workers with carts will collect it and take it to a canal where a garbage boat waits with its crane to lift the cart and dump it into the hold. Where it goes from there I do not know, and nor do the Venetians, I suspect. In this respect, they are just like us: out of sight, out of mind.

Need a police officer? Cabin cruisers with the words Policia Municipale or Carabinieri printed boldly on the side patrol the canals, blue lights on top of the cabin and siren in front at the ready for a fast ride to a crime scene or a swift pursuit of an errant boater. The twenty-something who drives a loud Honda Civic beater too fast on my street would be driving a boat too fast on a narrow canal, striking terror into the tourist hearts of gondola passengers and arousing the interest of the Policia. The crews who come to my neighborhood with lawn mowers in their pickup trucks would come in a boat in Venice – if there were a blade of grass for them to mow, which in most areas there is not. Anything that isn’t water or a building in Venice is pavement. Your plumber, electrician, dry cleaner, and colletto blu (Joe Sixpack) all drive boats. Imagine how many boats that requires in a city of sixty thousand!

For me, the piece de resistance of Venetian boating is the ambulanza. Here in Columbus, the ambulance that lives in nearby Fire Station 19 is an enormous, diesel powered vehicle that possibly contains an entire surgical suite in a Tardis-like interior. The Venetian ambulance is a swift yellow boat that proclaims Ambulanza in big letters and moves quickly, light flashing and siren blaring, on its way to retrieve the sick and take them to the hospital. The Ospidale SS Giovanni e Paolo sits on the Venetian lagoon, with its emergency entrance on the Fondamente Nuove, and that’s where the Ambulanza transports the sick. Parked there, as well as in a canal that runs alongside the Ospidale, are numerous ambulance boats. Doubtless there are rules of the canal for yielding to the Ambulanza, just as there are rules in Columbus, but I had no cause to learn them. It would take a braver person than I to venture into crowded Venetian waters, where the swarms of boats somehow manage to negotiate rights-of-way without many incidents. I could create an incident without breaking a sweat.

If you’re going to Venice, by all means see the sights you are supposed to see, for when you return there might be a quiz and you will be embarrassed to admit that you never even found the Piazza San Marco. But pay attention to the boats, for they are the red blood cells carrying sustenance throughout the city. And pay attention to the Venetians, which is to say, to the long-suffering remnant who haven’t fled this tourist-infested city in dismay or sunk to the level of fleecing visitors with Murano glass made in China. If you are really lucky, you will see, as I did, an irate elderly woman berating a slow-moving, confused tourist standing in the middle of a narrow calle and impeding her progress from the market to her home. That was also an inspiring sight, every bit as impressive as the boats passing under the Rialto Bridge.

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