a few steps away there is already a third one ready with an "even more special" price ... here, the tourist has taken the bait.
"In fact, the tourist with a satisfied air, staggering, got into the gondola." And this makes me angry, it shouldn't be like that! "I said." But you can understand them, the gondoliers. They work a few months a year and now almost only with foreigners and it costs to build and maintain a gondola. See, if they were subsidized by the municipality they could keep traffic low and everyone would go there more. If you continue like this they will be museum pieces. And to think that in the sixteenth century there were more than 10,000 and they must have been beautiful, different colors, adorned in silk velvet brocade, often with solid gold harnesses or even incense burners for perfumes. Too bad the plague has put them to mourning."
"They are also beautiful black," said Papa looking at the gondolas that swayed in line. "How many will it be today?"
"Maybe 500, maybe 700. If they continue to decrease Venice will no longer be Venice."
"You can't imagine a Venice without gondolas. Like you can't imagine a sea without fish," said Papa.
"For this they should be helped by the municipality. Indeed, by the Venetian Republic. I am not the only one who thinks that the Serenissima would be needed again. With a lot of Doge. Chosen, as at that time, among the most prestigious citizens and without then giving him too many freedoms. He was considered a 'servant' of the state and there isn't one who hasn't served him well."
"Yeah... probably arteriosclerosis - he became Doge at the age of eighty - made him too susceptible and he was accused of conspiring with commoners and bourgeois against the aristocracy to take revenge on that young patrician who had insinuated that his beautiful Dogaressa was betraying him. In any case, he was immediately beheaded."
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