Woman defies Venetian tradition in struggle to pilot a gondola

VENICE: For more than a thousand years, there has never been a female Venetian gondolier. But now there is Alexandra Hai.

After a decade of struggling to become a gondolier, Hai has won a moral victory. 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!" shouted one man from his third-story balcony on the Rio de la Veste canal as Hai paddled past, 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 Hai's boat and passengers slipped by.

"What elegance!" shouted another woman 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 an ancient, traditional, all-male craft, and who often hand down their jobs father to son. In fact the gondoliers are a just a little fed up with her.

Roberto Luppi, president of the gondolier association, said that Hai had been proved incapable of the complicated duties of handling a gondola 10 meters, or 35 feet, long, having failed four tests, and that she had used her gender to whip up media interest.

When asked about 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? That they are supposed to give her kisses?"

The imbroglio is playing out in a graceful, decaying, threatened city that resists change and survives on tourism.

Over 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 Hai was Ljubica Gunj, who eight years ago became the first female waitress permitted to serve customers at tables on St. Mark's Square. "I think it is chauvinism," she said of the opposition to Hai.

While 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.

Hai, a 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, is the center of a saga that pits charges of sexism, reverse sexism, mastery of the waterways and bias against foreigners.

She contends that she was clearly discriminated against in the workplace. In three of her four failed tests, she says, the city of Venice and the gondoliers rigged the tests against her. She says that she has been the target of insults and threats and that her boat has been repeatedly vandalized.

She contends that the gondoliers' association, despite warm overtures at the outset, never wanted a woman or a foreigner (she holds a German passport) among their ranks.

Hai rattles off her suspicions, which are provocative but unproved: that in one test, she was forced to use an oar that was as "light as a cigarette"; that in another, her route was littered with an usually high number of parked motorboats. She blames both the gondoliers' association and the city hall. "It is all connected in one way or another," she said. And once the Locanda Art Deco hired her privately, she says, she was regularly pulled over by the police to make sure her passengers were from the hotel.

Luppi sees it more simply, 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. We can no longer accept that she hides behind the fact that she is a woman and a foreigner," he said. The gondoliers note that many people fail the test each year.

To gondoliers, the job is fit for a man, because it involves strength, the ability to navigate currents and paddle in reverse, and even the aesthetics of the gondoliers of yore in their black-and-white striped shirts.