Mark's, and
from St. Mark's to the Bridge of Sighs, but that's only a quarter of the
reason. The other three-quarters is because they like to be rowed there
in gondolas by the gondoliers they've read about, and the gondoliers
they've read about wore proper gondoliering clothes--they didn't look
like East River loafers."
"They are poor men, these _gondolieri_," remarked the guide. "They
cannot afford."
"I am not an infant, my friend. I'm a business man from Chicago. It's a
business proposition. Put your gondoliers into the styles they wore when
Andrea Dandolo went looting Constantinople, and you'll double your
tourist traffic in five years. Twice as many people wanting gondolas,
wanting guides, wanting hotel accommodation, buying your coloured glass
and lace flounces--why, Great Scott! it would pay the city to do the
thing at the public expense. Then you could pass a by-law forbidding
gondoliering to be done in any style later than the fifteenth century.
Pay you over and over again."
Poppa was in earnest, he wanted it done. He was only dissuaded from
taking more active measures to make his idea public by the fact that he
couldn't stay to put it through.
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