Venice wouldn’t be Venice without its gondolas. The Italian city’s canals are made navigable thanks to these boats and their gondoliers, who have become as central to the Venetian tourist experience as visiting its iconic squares and eating its signature cicchetti (or bar bites).
But the city is now scrambling to save the tradition as gondoliers are becoming harder to come by.
Fewer young people are training to ferry gondolas through Venice, particularly as Italy experiences a record number of tourists—over 130 million last year. That’s threatening a sacred element of the city.
“There’s a generational change: people retire and need to be replaced,” Andrea Balbi, the president of Venice’s gondoliers’ association, told The Guardian in an interview published on Thursday.
Often seen in their typical garb of a striped top and straw hat navigating a single oar, gondoliers were once a community of thousands in Venice. But today, there are just under 450 of them.
The tradition was passed on from one generation to the next—specifically from father to son. Now, interested gondoliers must take a training course on the “Art of the Gondolier” to prove high school education, knowledge of swimming, and a medical certificate stating their fitness. The actual training will involve honing rowing skills and lessons on the history and culture of Venice.
The diverging forces of rising tourist demand and fewer gondoliers to engage them create the need for more of them.
In recent years, the barrier to becoming a gondolier has been lowered to allow women and any EU citizen (not just Italians) to join the profession. However, they will still have to meet the requirements for maneuvering the gondolas. Given their popularity with tourists, gondoliers will also be taught to say things in non-European languages.
It’s not easy being a gondolier, especially as a heat wave engulfs Europe, threatening the gondola rowing as it dries up the water in canals.
Still, Balbi said those who do it would do it for the love of the city because it is critical to Venice’s functioning.
“Venice would need to die before this profession dies,” he said. “People who apply themselves to this profession do so because they are in love with Venice and are convinced that they are bringing forward the traditions of the gondola and the city.”
Gondoliers have witnessed the ebbs and flows of tourism. They’ve seen everything from the slump during the COVID-19 pandemic to the gradual progression to overtourism. Venice has cracked down on groups bigger than 25 people and has also introduced a €5 entry fee to discourage crowds where it can. Still, there’s no stopping visitors from coming to one of the most iconic cities in the world. Venice can’t afford it either since tourism is integral to its revenue.
Even among tourists, not everyone is keen to learn about Venice’s heritage while on gondola rides.
“You usually find that the young ones only want to take selfies,” Balbi said. “It’s families or people over 30 who show more curiosity about the city and want to know its history and how it was built.”
Gondolas were one of the earliest ways of getting around Venice, if not on foot. Today, their role is to help people experience Venetian culture, so protecting the craft and the tradition around it could protect the heart of the city as a whole.