There is a “big wave incoming, use your legs!” shouts Gabriella Lazzari, as her laughing students try out their new gondoleering skills in the sunshine of Venice’s lagoon.
Lazzari is one of about 20 women who teach tourists from around the world how to row standing up, Venetian style, in batela coda di gambero, shrimp-tailed wooden boats.
“We take them out to the lagoon so they can do the gondoleering part without crashing into everybody,” quips Jane Caporal, who founded the Row Venice organization more than eight years ago in a bid to save the voga alla veneta style of rowing.
Photo: AFP
“Obviously Venice is motorized now, so people don’t row around in their little boats anymore,” she said.
“The idea is to save the tradition. Not just the actual rowing, everything: the boat building, the oar making, the forcola [rowlock] making, crafts that have been going for centuries and centuries,” she said.
Accountant Yezi Jin shrieks in delight as she drives the blade into the water and propels the boat forward, far from the peaceful canals of Italy’s floating city, in the vast open waters where vaporetto, or waterbuses, sail back and forth.
Photo: AFP
“It’s hard work, my back’s aching, but it’s great fun!” the 32-year old from Portland, Oregon, said as her husband, gripping his own oar tightly, tried valiantly to match her pace.
“We see all the islands here ... it’s very different from the Rialto Bridge or being in the crowds,” Jin added.
Most of the women who teach voga also race professionally and Row Venice sponsors them.
Caporal sees it as a way of attempting to level the playing field in a sport and profession dominated by men.
There is only one female gondolier in the whole city. She has had to fight tooth and claw for her share of the 20 million tourists who visit the Serenissima each year, Caporal said.
“The number of people certified as gondoliers is controlled by the gondoliers’ association.
“It’s a tightly closed shop. With Row Venice we’ve carved out a space for women to work too,” she added.
The British-born Australian, who has lived in Venice for 30 years, said she picked the batela — a traditional workboat now out of production — because it is more stable than the asymmetrical gondola and easier to maneuver.
“I came across one that was sold to me by a rowing club, it had been out of use for years. It was made by a master craftsman who had seen this kind of boat as a boy and remembered it,” she said.
The former stockbroking analyst fell in love with it, and was ready to shell out 14,000 euros (US$15,600) for a replica to be made.
However, the master craftsman had died. With no one left alive who knew how to make them, the boat builders had to get the plans from the city’s naval history museum.
“It’s a pleasure to enable tourists to live Venice by water, and explain the pollution and high-water problems,” said Lazzari, in reference to the damage cruise ships cause to the ecosystem and floods that leave Saint Mark’s Square underwater.
Early this month, a massive cruise ship lost control, crashing into the wharf and sparking fresh controversy over the damage the huge vessels cause to the city.
“I tell them about the types of boat there used to be, like the mascareta, so-called because it was used by masked ‘working women,’ or the gondolas, which were the taxis of the rich,” Lazzari added.
The Doges of Venice, the Republic’s rulers until the 18th century, boasted golden, two-deck ships which were used yearly in a “Marriage of the Sea” ceremony, which symbolically wedded Venice to the water.
Row Venice pays tribute to the carnival city’s heyday by sponsoring parties held on boats in the lagoon on summer nights.
By day, its craft glide peacefully past ducks diving for crabs and disused boatyards transformed into canal-side gardens.
“It was a dream come true,” says Alice Hendricks, 71, her eyes sparkling as she gets out of the batela after her first lesson.
“It was very challenging, it looks so easy when you watch the gondolieri doing it ... but after a few tries with it you kind of get a feeling for it. It’s a joy,” she said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”