nickstuart

Marco hadn’t really wanted the job in the first place. He’d been around his uncle Enrico’s gondola station on the Grand Canal since he was a kid, helping out here and there, running errands and occasionally assisting Alfonso with the maintenance. It was Enrico who had proposed the idea to Marco’s mother. “He's a good-looking boy, and he’s just sitting around.“ It was true. He was almost twenty and still living at home. Having grown up in the variegated boat-bound maze that is Venice, Marco had long learned to accept the constant seasonal flow of tourists as the life’s blood of the heart-shaped island city, and had similarly come to regard its costumed rowers as some sort of attending clo