Venice, Italy - For more than 1,000 years, Venice has had gondolas but never a female gondolier. But now there is Alexandra Hai.
After a decade of struggle, Hai has won the right to be a gondolier - sort of. A court recently allowed her to paddle around the canals but only for the residents of one hotel.
"Brava, gondoliera! Brava!" a man shouted from his third-story balcony on the Rio de la Veste canal as Hai paddled by on a recent day, shepherding a couple from Utah on their honeymoon. The man on the balcony, clenching a glass of champagne, beckoned his friends to take a look as Hai's boat and passengers slipped by.
What does not flow in her wake is popularity among the 425 gondoliers of Venice, who practice a traditional, all-male craft and who often hand down their jobs from father to son. In fact, the gondoliers are a little fed up with her.
Roberto Luppi, president of the gondoliers association, said Hai, a 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, had been proved incapable of the complicated duties of handling a 35-foot-long gondola, having failed four tests, and that she used the fact that she is a woman to whip up interest in the news media
The dispute is playing out in a graceful, decaying, threatened city that resists change and survives on tourism.
Hai is the center of a story that includes charges of sexism, reverse sexism, mastery of the waterways and bias against foreigners.
She contends that she has clearly been discriminated against.
She says the city of Venice and the gondoliers rigged the last three of the four failed tests against her. She says she has been the target of insults and threats and that her boat has been repeatedly vandalized.
She also contends that the gondoliers association, despite warm overtures at the outset, never wanted a woman or a foreigner among its ranks. She blames the gondoliers association and city hall.
"It is all connected in one way or another," she said.
Luppi sees it differently, saying, "She needs to look in the mirror and accept that she cannot drive."