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Like their counterparts in the horse cab trade the gondoliers worked long hours and to catch their shuteye whenever they could. The American artist John Singer Sargent loved drifting through the Venetian canals in a gondola and painted several pictures from the "gondola perspective". One of them, Gondoliers' Siesta (1905) shows a pair of gondoliers napping in their boats.
Source:
His daily nap. Photo by Gribayedoff.
Outing magazine, vol. LI no. 6, March, 1908, p. 653.
Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 48
The Gondolier of Venice / 9
We came to the Trattoria at Trovatore, which is "The Troubadour's Inn" in the Vio Corte del Sabion. Would you know the number? 'Tis 4-8. Would you know mine host? Meet, then, the good, smiling Giuseppe Gavagnin, who stands here bowing and gives you the hand of welcome. A low, long room, dark and cool; there are tables and chairs; there is a glass case displaying the pennons won by the Castellani; there are oil-portraits of the winning gondoliers of notable years; there were two score brown-faced, laughing, shouting Castellani; there were joyous girls in black; there was a huge tun of wine, holding forty quarts, borne in for the drinking, and there were songs and merriment. In the garden behind the inn were two courts for theGiocco di pali, the favorite game of the gondolier. Giuseppe and I took many a bout at it, those days. The game is in the nature of bowling, though for the pins a small ball is substituted. That andlotto are the gondolier's games. His amusements range from love-making – a sport for which there is biblical commendation – to visiting the little puppet theater and story-telling, which is the best of all amusements. I lay one afternoon on the hot stones of thetraghetto, among eight or ten gondoliers in red and white, while a Penso told us the favorite story of the "House of the Dead" – a pretty yarn, not unlike the fable of Romeo and Juliet and which takes hours in the telling. Another time I heard the story of the "Baker's Boy" or the "Innocent One Condemned to Death." Frankly these old legends are not very exciting, but the gondolier loves to hear them chanted by one of his fellows as he lies in the shade, smoking, waiting for tide or fare.