You might think, as I tend to, that the gondoliers of Venice must be becoming a thing of the past.

Well, we’d both be very mistaken! I was in Venice for a week last week and there were more gondoliers per capita than other people! They were everywhere!

They were all over the Grand Canal!

And they were all over the small canals that run through this city of water!

Yes, they were on the water!

And, on the land!

Always as distinctively Venetian, always as beautiful upon the water! Although I didn’t hear a single one singing, as I enjoyed in the late 1980s when I was a guest of the Italian government, staying in the Hotel Danieli on the Grand Canal and these men floated under my window from morning til dawn, singing all the standards: “O sole mio!” etc. ad infinitum.