I'm indebted again to the
7 Week Warrior for this article from the NYTimes. And no, we did not see this brave woman.
VENICE — For more than a thousand years, Venice has had gondolas but never a female gondolier. But now there is Alexandra Hai.
As Alexandra Hai plies the canals, many people shout encouragement. She won the right to run a hotel gondola but not to be called a gondolier.
After a decade of struggle, Ms. Hai has won the right to be a gondolier — sort of. A court recently allowed her to paddle around the canals of Venice, but only for the residents of one of the city’s hotels.
“Brava Gondoliera! Brava!” a man shouted from his third-story balcony on the Rio de la Veste canal as Ms. Hai paddled by on a recent day, shepherding a couple from Utah on their honeymoon. The man on the balcony, clenching a glass of Champagne, beckoned his friends to take a look as Ms. Hai’s boat and passengers slipped by.
“What elegance!” a woman shouted moments later. Wherever she paddles, eyes and cameras follow.
What does not flow in her wake is popularity among the 425 gondoliers of Venice, who practice a traditional, all-male craft, and who often hand down their jobs from father to son. In fact, the gondoliers are just a little fed up with her.
Roberto Luppi, president of the gondoliers’ association here, said that Ms. Hai, a 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, had been proven incapable of the complicated duties of handling a 35-foot-long gondola, having failed four tests, and that she used the fact that she is a woman to whip up interest in the news media.
When asked about Ms. Hai’s accusations that gondoliers had physically threatened her, he reacted with scorn. “After a person accuses gondoliers of being racists and sexists, what does she expect?” he said. “That they are supposed to give her kisses?”
The dispute is playing out in a graceful, decaying, threatened city that resists change and survives on tourism.
In the past half-century, Venice has experienced an exodus of residents. Its population, which stood at 184,000 in 1950, is now a third of that. Recurring flooding and rising tides have left many palazzos decrepit and uninhabitable. At night parts of the historical center are as deserted as an abandoned movie set.
“Venice is an incredible, fragile city,” said Anna Somers Cocks, the chairwoman of the Venice in Peril Fund, a British organization dedicated to protecting Venice from flooding. In her experience, she said, the city hews to the preservation of its cultural past at the expense of adaptation and rational city planning. “It matters terribly if you can’t introduce a new idea to help run the city,” she said.
A pioneering forerunner to Ms. Hai was Ljubica Gunj, who eight years ago became the first woman permitted to wait on customers at tables on St. Mark’s Square. “I think it is chauvinism,” she said of the opposition to Ms. Hai.
While Ms. Gunj tends tables at the Aurora Café, the Florian Café next door — in business since 1720 — lets women wait on tables only indoors, not on the piazza.
Ms. Hai is the center of a story that includes charges of sexism, reverse sexism, mastery of the waterways and bias against foreigners.
She contends that she has clearly been discriminated against. She says that the city of Venice and the gondoliers rigged the last three of the four failed tests against her. She says that she has been the target of insults and threats and that her boat has been repeatedly vandalized.
She also contends that the gondoliers’ association, despite warm overtures at the outset, never wanted a woman or a foreigner among their ranks. (She holds a German passport and has been here for 11 years.)
Ms. Hai rattled off her suspicions, which are provocative but unproven: that in one test, she was forced to use an oar that was as “light as a cigarette” and that in another, her route was littered by an unusually high number of moored motorboats. After the Locanda Art Deco hotel hired her privately, she was regularly pulled over by the police to make sure her passengers were from that hotel, she said.
She blames both the gondoliers’ association and city hall. “It is all connected in one way or another,” she said. Mr. Luppi sees it differently, saying, “She needs to look in the mirror and accept that she cannot drive.”
“We gave her two chances to pass the test every time,” he said. “We can no longer accept that she hides behind the fact that she is a woman and a foreigner.” The gondoliers note that many people fail the test each year.
To gondoliers, the job is fit only for a man, since it involves strength, ability to navigate currents and paddle in reverse, and even the aesthetics of the gondoliers of yore in their black-and-white striped shirts.
Mauro Morozini, a gondolier who is 48, said it is a question of skill and not her sex. “Let’s leave just one tradition intact,” he said. “Being a gondolier is a tradition and it is very difficult work.”
Ms. Hai is not much bothered by the thought that the gondoliers and city hall might appeal the court ruling allowing her to steer her gondola, Pegasus, down the city’s canals. “They can go to the pope,” she said. “I won’t stop them.”
Despite her marathon to win acceptance from the gondoliers, Ms. Hai says she is not exactly a fierce warrior. Indeed, she finds herself miscast for the role.
“There is nothing worse than to do something like this,” she said in a chat at a cafe in the Piazza St. Angelo, describing the decade she spent pressing for limited acceptance. “It is sad to waste my entire life like this. I would have preferred to do something more useful in life, like helping save the rain forests.”
