#6: The Death of the Gondolier
The gondolier was once part boatman, part local guide, part living tradition. Now the profession risks becoming a costume in the tourism machine, reduced to striped shirts, staged romance, and the same canal route repeated for visitors filming every second. That doesn’t mean gondoliers lack skill. Quite the opposite. It means a real craft can become flattened into performance when the city around it is treated like scenery.
