Rescue at sea... and anti-tourism in Venezia
First the story of Venetian can-do...
Two of my customers had just finished a dinner at La Piscina on the Zattere. Upon leaving the dining platform perched 2 feet above the Giudecca Canal, wishing to record the view for posterity, Carol dropped her Canon into the canal. They went home the next day and I received an email asking if it was recoverable. The problem was not the camera but the almost 200 pics of their Italian holiday that were lost.
The Giudecca Canal is the very wide canal in which cruise ships of 3,000 to 5,000 passengers (each) ply every day, and, thus, the water is deep and rough. But I remembered a gondolier named Dante who was occasionally asked to retrieve lost items sub-aqua. Once, he successfully retrieved a lost diamond ring that fell into the S. Trovaso Canal near the Schiavi bar, an expat watering hole. I phoned Dante and he agreed to do a dive, now three days after the camera fell. The next day, Dante arrived in his power boat at lunch time.. La Piscina restaurant is on left in the picture. 
Apprised of the situation, he was pessimistic, given the serious tides and also the infestation of a newly arrived seaweed called Japanese something. Like a trooper, Dante donned his wet suit, adjusted his face mask and took the plunge...note Japanese seaweed in the picture.
Now Dante does his thing. The water near the edge is only about two to two and one-half metres deep so no need for weights or a snorkel, just breath control. Dante smokes between two and three packs a day.
Dante repeatedly surfaced and dived, each time asking me if I am sure that the location is right...yes, yes, I say, it's down there. By this time we have attracted a crowd, including the four waiters from the Piscina restaurant, the bus boys, and some of the diners and passers by. And all had opinions. An unwelcome visitor was a police boat. Swimming in a canal is prohibited in Venice. Also, no private boats are allowed to dock or tie-up anywhere on the Giudecca Canal. The 2 cops gave Dante a verbal warning. But Dante, a grizzled Venetian, gave them some considerable Venetian lip, and the cops decided to float away. Da
nte made about 20 surface dives and, when all seemed lost, like King Arthur when he pulled Excalibur from the stone, Dante triumphantly shot out of the water with the camera in hand. Rounds of applause. Deep joy. Dante, our hero.
The camera was completely waterlogged. Those silver-type cases may look watertight, they ain't. I drained the camera and removed the memory card. I then buried the camera at sea...again. At home I was able to upload all 197 pictures after a wipe clean with a cotton bud. Holiday rescued, camera ruined.
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Is the following anti-tourism or what? I am talking about the Venice government's attitude to tourists. Tourists keep this city alive; there is no other business - the glass business, for example, is simply a part of the tourist trade. We get approximately 22,000,000 tourists per annum and there are about 57,000 people who live here. Just the facts, m'am, as Sgt Joe Friday said often. It is said Venice and Florence are the two most expensive cities in Italy, for everything - housing, hotels, restaurants, stuff, services, and ...transportation.
Which brings me to today's second topic: Venice's discriminatory policies for transport. Below is a vaporetto, otherwise known as a water bus.
Item 1: a one hour ticket for a waterbus for a Venetian resident costs €0.90. For a tourist(American, Italian, French, etc.) it costs €6.50. For a monthly pass, a Venetian pays €26, a tourist pays €31 for only 72 hours.
Item 2: Until a month or two ago, there were two main waterbus lines on the Grand Canal (the lines most used by Venetians and tourists): The no. 1 and the no. 2 (formerly the no.82). Then the city added a new line, the no. 3, which stops at the same local stops as the no. 1. The no. 3, however, is available only to Venetian residents. It usually carries a only a handful of riders, while the other two lines are uncomfortably packed solid with some Venetians but mostly with tourists. You should see the expressions on the faces of Americans and non-resident Italian tourists who innocently try to board a no. 3 and are told,sometimes brusquely, "solo residenti", residents only, and they are not allowed to board. Thus, all day long near-empty no. 3 vaporettos sail up and down the Grand Canal while the nos. 1 and 2 often look like refugee boats, teeming with humanity hanging over the sides. ...another nose thumb to tourists. ....a good solution would have been to make the no. 3, another no. 1, so we could have a no.1 running every 5 mins instead of every 10, and tourists and Venetians would be happy.
