My smooth but muscular strokes left her weak with admiration. My passionate baritone on O Sole Mio melted her frigid heart.
My jaunty, red-ribboned hat brought a coy but unmistakably willing smile to her lips.
Then, obviously, a big bloke splashed water in my face and I woke from my daydream to the bitter reality of life in gondolier school - which was two grumpy men barking at me in phrases I didn’t understand, but knew instinctively to be uncomplimentary.
I was trying to impress someone in Venice; and, since I clearly wasn’t going to do it with my linguistic abilities (“Ciao bella! Buongiorno! Quattro formaggi! Cinquecento! Fascisti!”), I needed something else.
Chaps have been gondoliering around Venice since the 11th century, according to my guidebook, so how difficult could it be? (Very, it turns out.) And what price true love and this unique opportunity to see La Serenissima from a whole new perspective? (£236.)
Olivia and I were staying at the Cipriani - I told you I was trying to impress. This ever-elegant grande dame of a hotel is sited splendidly at one end of the Giudecca, the long, spindly finger of “real Venice” that sits half a mile south of St Mark’s Square. This, I thought, would be the perfect place to practise my pole work - away from the hurtling traffic of central Venice. (I’m not joking: earlier this year, speed cameras were installed on several canals.)
After a few words with a concierge who looked old and sage enough to remember when they invented the gondola, I had a date at Canottieri Giudecca. Did I speak any Italian, the concierge wanted to know. No, I told him. He responded with a shrug and an expression that could have meant “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine” or, alternatively, “They’llbe fishing your squid-nibbled corpse out of the Lido by four”.
The canottieri (which roughly translates as boat club) was a 20-minute stroll down the Giudecca from the Cipriani. It would have been 10, but on the northern embankment it’s impossible to get much above pottering speed - not, refreshingly, because of the tangle of tourists who clog the arteries around the town’s central sestieri, but because you have a view of the whole soaring, arching, leaning, dreaming, doming, goddess-graceful Venetian skyline.
The pontoons and slipways of the canottieri, sadly, sit on the other side of the Giudecca, looking out to the Lido and, if you’re really ambitious, the Adriatic. Sure enough, my teachers, Alberto and Giorgio, spoke no English; so, after a lot of hand-shaking, smiling and pointing, we jumped into the gondola and they paddled us out into open water and explained, elegantly and comprehensively, the key techniques of it all. In Italian.
The basics, fortunately, are simple: don’t tell Olivia, but it’s pretty much jumped-up rowing. The difficult part is that you have to do it standing up. That’s much harder than it sounds - gondolas are a lot wobblier than, say, punts - and especially so when you’re being subjected to a stereophonic torrent of abuse from your teachers.
Giorgio and Alberto seemed to have evolved the “good cop, bad cop” motivational method into something more along the lines of “bad cop, worse cop” - and, while I can’t actually be sure that their words weren’t ones of encouragement, I can report that “bene” was said only once. Possibly sarcastically.
In the end, I got by with a few fragments of schoolboy Latin and barely remembered musical terminology. Piano, of course, meant softly (and not, as I first feared, that I manoeuvred us with the grace of a baby grand); sotto acqua, I worked out, meant that the oar wasn’t supposed to break the water. (It’s an odd quirk of gondolas that, after your pull stroke, you simply rotate the oar round so it slides back through the water without resistance, which saves the effort of heaving it out of the H2O each time.) Tranquillo, stabile, profondo and regolare, I could cope with. Spingere, as I knew from seeing it on doors, meant either push or pull, so I just sort of wibbled fecklessly whenever I heard it.
It took perhaps 45 (anxious, unstable, sweaty) minutes of my two-hour lesson before I was confident to look up as I rowed - from then on, though, it was wonderful. Olivia, I learnt later, was following the other fools up every campanile she could find and wondering why she felt she wasn’t seeing the Venice that so moved Canaletto and Byron and Vivaldi. The answer, of course, is that there’s no point traipsing up towers: this city is best seen from an altitude of zero. If there is ever a place you want to experience at water level, it’s Venice; and out there on the prow of my gondola, seeing the city before me and the lagoon about me, sunlight shimmering off the surface and no noise but the seductive lick of wavelet on wood, I felt as if I could be in a Canaletto.
Except that my legs were shaking like early Elvis, thanks to the fatigue in my hitherto underused gondoliering muscles. For the last half-hour, I sat back (deliciously literally) and let Alberto and Giorgio take over. We started moving at four times our previous speed, but we were still never going to make it as far as St Mark’s, so we drifted past some of the Giudecca’s grander palazzos instead. “Elton John,” Alberto seemed to say, gesturing at one of the more opulent efforts, and I nodded agreeably, thinking that perhaps “e’ ton giorno” meant “One day, maybe, you’ll have one of those” or that the word “eltonjohn” had become a kind of Esperanto for absurd indulgence. But no: that same sage concierge back at my hotel confirmed thati signori Elt and David did indeed live next door.
Olivia was impressed - which was just as well, because she never got a chance to see me in gondola action. When the stiffness set in the next day, I could barely lift my arms and my legs were all over the shop. Fortunately, I had a backup plan - though even that turned out to be a risk. As our professional gondolier eased the two of us round the romantic little back canals of San Polo, his biceps bulging like Popeye’s beneath his shirt, I could see Olivia was torn between the two of us.
But Benito didn’t buy her ice cream, did he? I did - and now I know the recipe for seduction. It’s one scoop chocolate, one scoop mint. And leave the heavy work to the professionals.
Ed Grenby travelled as a guest of Elegant Resorts, the Hotel Cipriani and BMI
Travel details
Packages: Elegant Resorts (01244 897516, www.elegantresorts.co.uk ) has three nights at the Cipriani in a lagoon-view room from £1,720pp, B&B, including British Airways flights from Gatwick. Or try Kuoni (01306 747002, www.kuoni.co.uk ) or Kirker Holidays (020 7593 1899, www.kirkerholidays.com ).
Getting there: airlines flying to Venice’s Marco Polo airport include BMI (0870 6070 555, www.flybmi.com ), EasyJet (www.easyjet.co.uk ), Jet2 (www.jet2.com ) and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com ). Ryanair (www.ryanair.com ) flies to Treviso. Where to stay:the Cipriani (0845 077 2222, www.hotelcipriani.com ) has rooms from £685, B&B; ask for a refurbished one, as the others are starting to look old-fashioned. Or try the Molino Stucky Hilton, at the other end of the Giudecca (00 39-041 272 3311, www.molinostuckyhilton.com ; doubles from £225). More modest is the Locanda Ca’ Zose (041 522 6635, www.hotelcazose.com ; doubles from £106). Go gondoliering:Canottieri Giudecca (00 39-041 528 7409, www.canottierigiudecca.com ) offers two-hour gondola lessons on the lagoon for £236, as well as courses and one-off lessons in other watercraft. Bring your own stripy top.
Posted by Shona Lockhart, 29th March 2009
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