Well, we’ve never been to Nice, Greece, or ME, but like many a drag queen, we know what hot dick looks like.

When we saw the work of Venetian photographer Piero Pazzi we knew we had found a fellow searcher for … let’s call it truth.

Perhaps most known (notorious?) for his calendars of heartstoppingly handsome Italian priests, Pazzi also brings out a calendar and guide to the luscious — and seemingly available — gondoliers that ply the waters of the Grand Canal — and who knows what else is plied or plowed under those famous midnight bridges?

We’re dreaming, in particular, of a nighttime passage piloted by the sturdy arms of some lordly lad, coming to a lengthy stop beneath the Rialto Bridge with its lace-like stone canopy and Renaissance arches — a place so self-intoxicated with Italian beauty that it was a beloved cruising spot for Sebastian Venerable, Tom Ripley, and so many other twilight males of High Lavender Literature.

None more famous than Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which bring us to our excuse for running all these diveen-o pictures.

Because of the Thomas Mann classic, Venice, a city already sunk in watery melancholy, will forever have a certain haunted homoeroticism.

Death in Venice provides us as well with a humpy, never-to-be forgotten portrait of the gondolieri, as you will see:

One day an eminent historian, greatly lionized in his native Germany, finds himself for the first time staring at a coarse red-headed man in a cemetery, and in his embarrassment flees — but apparently not far enough.

He decides he must take a trip. Fatally, he decides it will be Venice.

In Venice, the eminent Aschenbach encounters something he is not ready for. He has always had an austere, intellectualized reverence for art but in Venice he finds unfiltered beauty coming at him directly — and in the form of men and boys.

Knowing only the life of the mind, Aschenbach is seized by a progressively cloying fever that is both literal — he has caught the cholera which, hidden from the tourists, is raging through the lagooned city — and spiritual.

In this state, he is subject to exaggerated perceptions. He becomes infatuated with an angelic fellow tourist, staying with his family at the same hotel, reading into the boy’s pale, graceful reserve classical metaphors involving Apollo.

Silently, helplessly Aschenbach follows the boy and his sisters over the bridges and cobblestone walkways of Venice, merely to observe him. To his horror, as the mounting humidity of the cholera takes over, the great historian allows a barber to darken his hair and apply color to his cheek.

The writing becomes florid at this point, mimicking Aschenbach’s rising temperature, and we’re not sure whether the barber-chair degradation is the besotted historian’s attempt to assume the youth and beauty of the boy as a sort of Platonic essence, or in fact, to attract the boy himself — certainly a reading favored by modern readers, though perhaps a shallow, facile one.

As in a fever dream, Aschenbach is menaced and side-tracked in his pursuit of young Tadzio by a series of wily, and always red-headed, men, including a gruff unlicensed gondolier who, despite Aschenbach’s protests, takes him on a meandering trip through the night waters, repeating somewhat provocatively “I can row you well.”

Nothing could be heard but the splashing of the oar, the hollow slap of the waves against the gondola’s prow … and then a third thing, a voice, a whisper. It was the murmur of the gondolier, who was talking to himself through his clenched teeth in fits and starts, emitting sounds that were squeezed out of him by the labor of his arms. Aschenbach looked up and realized with some astonishment that the lagoon was widening about him and that he was traveling in the direction of the open sea…

“I told you to take me to the steamer landing,” he repeated, turning around completely and looking up into the face of the gondolier, whose figure, perched on the high deck and silhouetted against the dun sky, towered behind him. The man had a disagreeable, indeed brutal-looking appearance, he wore … a shapeless straw hat that was tilted rakishly on his head… he plied his oar with great energy, putting his whole body into every stroke. Several times he pulled his lips back with the strain, baring his white teeth. His reddish eyebrows puckered, he looked out over his passenger’s head and replied in a decisive, almost curt tone of voice…

“I row you well”

And that, boys and girls, is your gondolier and literature break for the day.

 

For more Gondoliers

Piero Pazzi’s 2007 Calendar of Gondoliers
Pazzi’s Guide, Gondola e al Gondolieri
(only available in Italian)

And, of course, Thomas Mann’s masterpiece
Death in Venice