Vaporetto

A vaporetto is a water taxi or waterbus in Venice, Italy. There are 19 scheduled lines that serve locales within Venice, and travel between Venice and nearby islands, e.g., Murano and Lido.

The name, vaporetto, could be translated as "little steamer", and refers to similarly purposed ships in the past that were run by steam. The natives call the vaporetto Batèo. The waterbus line is operated by Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano (Actv), the Venetian public transportation system. The system is necessary in Venice as the deep canals prohibit the building of underground railways, and there is no space for overground trains, leaving the canals as the only viable rapid transport system. Most vaporetti have disabled access.

It has twenty-four-hour scheduled service, with frequency varying by the line. Line 1 serves the Grand Canal. Several lines are limited to the summer season, April to October.

ACTV sells 12, 24, 36, 48 and 72 hour passes as well as single-journey tickets and 7-day passes.

Vaporetto 13: A Novel

Vaporetto 13 is a mystery novel set mainly in Venice, Italy, by Robert Girardi. The title refers to the Vaporetto, which is a motorized water taxi commonly used in Venice, Italy.

Plot

Jack Squire is a Currency Trader on assignment to Venice where he discovers both the light and dark of the city.

Major characters include Jack Squire, currency trader from Washington, D.C. and Caterina, is the girl from Venice who haunts Jack Squire.

Publishing history

Published by a Delacorte in 1997, the third of four by Girardi that they carried.

Criticism

Kirkus, 08/15/1997 "For as long as the tale's dream state is sustained, the result is exquisite and eerie."

Literary Review, January 1998 "Girardi elevates the commonplace theme of spirituality versus Mammon into a haunting fantasy."—Lisa Allardice

Times Literary Supplement, 03/06/1998 "Girardi's stories operate at the fringes of their genre, where actualized metaphor blurs into merely improbable realism; he has a good eye for the details which make the supernatural or flamboyant plausible....The sense of the gradual meltdown of his life is precisely handled....There are moments of closely imagined strangeness....[T]he weirdness is balanced by the quotidian Venice..., a bourgeois city of baptisms and adultery."