The Unlicensed Gondola
A fog-choked canal in Venice at 6:03 AM, where a hand-painted gondola with no registration number is tied to a rotting mooring post outside a shuttered glass-blowing workshop on Murano.
A retired gondolier named Enzo has offered to ferry them across the lagoon to a private island where a reclusive collector is supposedly selling a 14th-century nautical chart for €400 — a document that, if authentic, is worth somewhere north of €2 million. The catch: Enzo's gondola has no running lights, the fog is thick enough to taste, and the crossing requires navigating a shipping lane used by the 7:15 AM cargo ferry from Treviso. Enzo says he's done it a thousand times. Enzo is also 83 and keeps calling them by his dead brother's name.
“The man navigated this lagoon before GPS existed. If anything, the fog is helping us — nobody sees us buy the chart, nobody sees us leave.”
“He called me 'Giancarlo' four times and the boat is leaking into my left shoe. We are not crossing a shipping lane in a wooden canoe with a man who might be navigating from memory of the 1970s.”
Enzo made it exactly 340 meters into the shipping lane before the 7:15 cargo ferry from Treviso — running seven minutes early — clipped the stern of the gondola and spun it like a compass needle. The nautical chart, the gondola's registration-free hull, and one of Double's shoes are now somewhere on the floor of the Venetian lagoon; Enzo, treading water with supernatural calm, asked Giancarlo why he was screaming.
We were SO close — and honestly, if the ferry had been on time like a normal ferry, we'd be millionaires right now.
I am standing in a Italian Coast Guard blanket, missing a sock, and I have never been more right about anything in my life.