René Seindal

I’m René Seindal, a Dane living in Venice for over fifteen years with my Venetian wife Martina and our two dogs, Stella and Giubba.

History Walks Venice #

I do history theme walks and boat tours in Venice as History Walks Venice.

Besides the History Walks, and the boat tours to abandoned islands in the Venetian lagoon, I also work as an occasional guide on the Lazzaretto Nuovo museum.

I have an M.A. in History and Italian from the University of Copenhagen and I’m an authorised tour leader (accompagnatore turistico) in English, Italian and Danish.

When at university, I became fascinated by the Sicilian mafia, which lead to a thesis, and later a book, published in Danish and English.

Kayaking in Venice (2007-2019) #

Almost twenty years ago I discovered sea kayaking, which quickly became a large part of my life. By some inscrutable quirks of destiny, I ended up running a kayaking business in Venice for over ten years.

I’ve had at least ten thousand persons on my kayak tours in Venice, working along a handful of great guides, colleagues and employees.

While it was a great experience it came to an end, and I handed the reins of the business over to other people. It is still around, but I have nothing to do with it any more.

I still do the occasional kayaking outing in the Venetian lagoon, with the eco-museum on the Lazzaretto Nuovo.

Photography #

Photography has always been a hobby of mine. In Venice I’ve tried to develop my photography further, by following a series of courses and activities to learn and grow.

One of the results is my personal photographic project Venice Street Photography.

Computers and Programming #

My first line of study at university was Computer Science, and one of my first jobs was as a system administrator of the Unix servers of the CS dept., where I got a thorough knowledge of Unix and later Linux.

During those years at university I wrote GNU m4 – a re-write of the classic Unix v7 macro-processor. I hardly ever used it since, but was important back them for sendmail configurations, and it later found its way into the GNU autotools.

Consequently there are some books – the printed GNU m4 manual – circulating with my name on it.

Even though I graduated in History, I still find lots of fun in fooling around with computers. I mostly write my own plugins for my WordPress sites. A few of them have made it into the official registry: Backlinks Taxonomy for keeping track of the internal linking structure on a WordPress site, and Planet Planet for making RSS aggregator sites like Paddling Planet.

Contact #

You can contact me by email: rene@seindal.dk or on Signal.