Italy — Business didn’t dry up, but some of Venice’s famous gondoliers have had to limit their movements in recent weeks after water levels in some of the Italian city’s smaller canals dropped because of unusually low tides.
“We have had four exceptional low tides, and each time the water was so low in certain canals that we had to steer away from them,” one gondolier, Andrea Balbi, told NBC News on Thursday.
“I have been a gondolier for 28 years, and I have never seen so many low tides at once,” he added.
Worse still, he said some gondolas that had been “parked” got stuck in the trickle of water and mud “and they had to wait for the tide to rise again to get them out.”
