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Alexandra Hai, also known as Alex Hai, 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, is the first female in the city of Venice, Italy who is paid to row clients around the city in a gondola. She's called “la gondoliera”, that is the feminine gender of the noun “gondoliere”: the boatman who, standing on the stern, maneuvers the only roar of the gondola;〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/gondoliere/ )〕 despite this, some people refuse to call her “gondolier” because she works as private gondolier and not as gondolier of the City hall. Pioneer of a craft that is been a male preserve for centuries, in 1996 Alex Hai begun as apprentice gondolier working on the “traghetto”, the gondola ferry that carries people from one side to the other of the Grand Canal and back. She has attempted and failed the test to apply for one of the coveted and limited (425) public gondolier licenses several times: in 1997 she failed to pass the written exam to become substitute gondolier. In 1999 she didn't pass the rowing test, that was nullified because the commission was composed exclusively by men, contrasting the Italian law D.L. 29/1993 about equal opportunity between men and women. The test was repeated, but Alex Hai reached a score that was lower of the previous time. About these failures, the public opinion of gondoliers was controversial: Roberto Luppi, gondolier and president of the gondoliers' association from 2003 to 2009, said that she should never have tried, even though he said he supported other women from Venice who did, and that “A woman is the best thing in the world, but she shouldn't be a gondolier () In my opinion, she should stay at home and take care of a family”; Roberto Sussberg, jury member of the test and director of Ente Gondola, the City hall office for the gondola's safeguard, said that the gondoliers were wrong to be hostile to Alex Hai because during the war mothers and grondmother rowed gondolas; Fulvio Scarpa, gondolier and president of the gondoliers' association from 1992 to 1998, initially encouraged Alex to attempt the test: he said that part of the category willfully obstructed her and that it would be better for the gondoliers to give her the public licence. However, Alex Hai has created a job for herself as a sort of chauffeur and currently works as a private gondolier for some hotels and selected clients, resuming the Venetian history when patrician families kept their own gondolas and their own private gondoliers, known as gondoliers "de casada”; in fact, to recall this tradition she dresses the reproduction of an eighteenth-century gondolier uniform from the private collection of the Venetian Count Girolamo Marcello. There are no more such gondoliers at this time: today, Alex Hai is the only private gondolier in Venice; the previous and last one was the gondolier of Peggy Guggenheim. In July 2005 Alexandra Hai launched her own gondola naming her "Pegaso" (Pegasus) after the winged horse in Greek mythology, son of Poseidon and the Gorgon Medusa. The “ferro” (the iron ornament on the front of the gondola) is a reproduction from an ancient one, characterized by a patrician family badge and a sea serpent on its tip. Gianfranco “Crea” Vianello, a Venetian gondola builder on the island of Giudecca, restored this gondola for her. He was a supporter of Hai in her pursuit to become a gondolier and also helped her in fine-tuning her rowing technique. Hai dedicated her gondola to the French revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots, a pseudonym for Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, Baron de Cloots. He was of Prussian origin and made a French citizen by the Revolutionary Convention Nationale. He took the name Anacharsis during the French Revolution and was executed in 1794. Hai chose the Venetian language verse as the theme for her gondola: "E la luna nassara’ per sognar un altro di’" (And the moon will be born to dream of another day) In October 2006 a law of the City hall〔Ordinanza n.491 del 17/10/06〕 forbade the circulation of gondoliers without public licence: the ordinance was considered by the local press “ad personam”, because in all Venice only Alex Hai was affected by it; in 2007 the ordinance was nullified by the TAR (Regional Administrative Court): since then Alex Hai is called from many “prima gondoliera” (first woman gondolier) and the news was reported by the foreign press as the crucial moment of a story of sexism and bias against foreigners. With a past of aspiring filmmamker, Alex Hai regained her early artistic education in Hamburg and San Francisco doing a performance in gondola during the Regata Storica in 1999, and being co-author of an art exhibition in a private gallery in Venice in 2014. ==References== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alexandra Hai」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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