Giorgia Boscolo, a 23-year-old mother of two, is Venice’s first official female gondolier

Giorgia Boscolo dreamed of following in her father’s gondola wake since girlhood. All she had to do was overcome nine centuries of taboos.

Reporting from Venice, Italy – As a little girl in Venice, Giorgia Boscolo was forever bugging her father to let her ride with him in his gondola. While her three sisters played with their dolls, she would beg him for a turn with the remo, or oar.

Dante Boscolo, an indulgent Italian father, humored his pint-sized shadow — to a point.

“My father only let me row when it was bad weather,” Giorgia recalled with a laugh.

His retort was swift: “That’s how you learn.”

Learn she did. Last month, the 23-year-old mother of two calmly took her place in one of Venice’s storied gondolas and gently steered the sleek black boat straight into the annals of history.

With the splash of her oar, nine centuries of taboos in this romantic canal city shattered as Boscolo passed a rigorous exam of brains and brawn to become Venice’s first official female gondolier — or gondoliera in Italian, a term that didn’t even exist until her achievement made it necessary.

The waters have been choppy at times, and not just in the canals, but Boscolo at last feels in her element.

“I was born among gondoliers,” she said on a languorous afternoon brilliant with sunshine. “It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.”

Boscolo’s breakthrough propelled her into the ranks of what can no longer be described with complete accuracy as an elite fraternity, made up of bluff and hearty boatmen whose presence along Venice’s winding waterways seems as timeless as the city itself.

Fewer than 500 gondoliers are licensed to navigate Venice’s network of 150 canals. They’re a fairly macho bunch, instantly recognizable in their jaunty black-and-white-striped shirts, lounging lazily against the bank-side walls waiting for tourists to hire them or letting loose the occasional low whistle at women who walk by.

They are heirs to a tradition stretching back nearly a millennium, when the signature banana-shaped boats first began plying the waters as a quick and easy means of transport. The men who captained them became indispensable fixtures around the Venetian lagoon, proud of their skill and bonded by shared experience.

As is inevitable when such a testosterone-laden citadel is breached, not all of Boscolo’s new colleagues have been thrilled about her entry into their midst. Some grumble sotto voce that she’s become too big for her britches, upending the old order and hogging all the attention.

Boscolo shrugs off the criticism with the same determined cool that got her here in the first place.

“The important thing is to do what you want to do,” she declared.

Whether she sought it or not, there’s no doubt that Boscolo commands the spotlight. When it was announced at the end of June that she had qualified, just barely, as an apprentice gondolier, the media hordes swooped in.

TV stations jockeyed for airtime with the telegenic blond. A savvy entrepreneur swiftly turned Boscolo and her boatman father into pinup models, featuring them together as Mr. and Ms. April in a 2010 calendar of sexy gondoliers that hit stores within days.

“I didn’t expect it,” she said, shaking her head at the feeding frenzy. “Every phone call was a different journalist.”

Rumors spread that she’d hired a smooth-talking agent to handle her affairs and was demanding money for interviews. Boscolo has denied those reports, saying she merely delegated the task of fielding so many calls and requests to one of her sisters and that the only payment she has asked for was reimbursement for the cost of traveling to Milan for an interview.

Still, the hype rang alarm bells at the gondoliers guild, the centuries-old guardian of gondoliering tradition. The association presides over what remains a tightly controlled, almost feudally organized trade that regulates even the smallest of details, down to the width of the stripes on the gondoliers’ shirts and the hefty fines they must pay for infractions of the official code of conduct.

Guild officials warned Boscolo to rein in her newfound celebrity or risk losing her apprenticeship.

by: www.latimes.com