L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 24 L'Italo-Americano C r o s s t h e l i t t l e canal called the Rio di San Tro- vaso, in the Dor- soduro quarter of Venice, and you come upon s o m e t h i n g t h a t l o o k s a s t h o u g h i t w a n d e r e d d o w n from the Alps and lost its way among the palaces: a cluster of low wooden buildings with sloping roofs and open g a l l e r i e s , m o r e m o u n t a i n chalet than lagoon house, with a sloping yard of bare earth running straight down into t h e w a t e r . G o n d o l a s l i e tipped on their sides in that yard, black hulls gleaming like the backs of whales, and now and then a man in a work apron moves among them with a plane or a torch. This is the Squero di San Trova- so, and it is one of the last places on earth where a gon- dola is still built, from the keel up, entirely by hand. A s q u e r o i s a V e n e t i a n boatyard, the workshop where the city's wooden boats are b o r n a n d , m o r e a n d m o r e t h e s e d a y s , r e p a i r e d . S a n Trovaso is the oldest of the survivors, working this same patch of ground since around the year 1600, back when the Republic still ruled the seas and the lagoon carried thou- sands of gondolas rather than the few hundred it does now. There were once squeri all over Venice, today there are o n l y a b o u t f i v e l e f t , a n d among them San Trovaso is the one visitors know, partly b e c a u s e i t s y a r d o p e n s s o frankly onto the canal that you can stand on the far bank and simply watch the work go on. The strange Alpine look of the place tells us all about a story where the families who built Venice's boats were, for the most part, not lagoon peo- ple at all but mountain people, come down from Cadore and t h e V a l Z o l d a n a i n t h e Dolomites, more than sixty miles to the north. They came because the boats did: the timber floated down from those same forests, and the carpenters who knew how to work it came with it. So they built their yards to look like home: wooden houses with wide eaves and covered lofts, made to keep the rain off a half-finished hull and to store tools and seasoning wood up under the roof. Four cen- t u r i e s o n , t h e m o u n t a i n s somehow still stand at the water's edge in the middle of Venice. To watch a gondola take shape can be fascinating and certainly striking, if you think t h a t e a c h o n e i s m a d e o f around 280 separate pieces of wood, and not just any wood: eight different kinds, each chosen for what only it can do. Oak for the sides, because it is the strongest; elm for the ribs, because it b e n d s w i t h o u t b r e a k i n g ; cherry, soft and willing, for the seats; walnut, hard and fine, for the oarlock; fir and larch, which shrug off water, d o w n a l o n g t h e b o t t o m ; lime, which barely moves as the temperature shifts, for the blocks at bow and stern. A s q u e r a r o l , a m a s t e r builder, holds the propor- tions of the whole thing in his h e a d a n d h i s h a n d s , a n d makes it both by eye and by measurement. And here is the secret hid- den in every gondola, the thing most passengers never n o t i c e : i t i s c r o o k e d o n purpose. The hull is built longer and fuller on the left side, by about nine inches, so that it leans to the right and lists against the push of the single oar, which the gondo- lier works always from the r i g h t - h a n d s i d e n e a r t h e stern. Left to itself, a gondola would carve a slow circle; the lopsided hull straightens it out and turns the labor of one man with one oar into some- thing that looks, from the bank, like effortless gliding. Every boat is shaped to the body and weight of the gon- dolier who will spend his life standing in it, so that no two are ever exactly alike. The oar rests in a piece of sculpture called the fòrcola, carved from a single block of walnut into a shape so com- plicated it looks abstract, all curves and notches. Every notch is a working position – for pushing off, for driving hard ahead, for turning, for slowing, for backing up, for coming to rest – so that the whole grammar of moving a boat through a crowded canal is written into one twist of wood. Then there is the fèrro, the toothed steel blade that r e a r s u p a t t h e p r o w a n d gives the gondola its unmis- takable silhouette. It began as ballast, a counterweight to the gondolier standing far back at the other end, but the Venetians, being Venetians, made it into a portrait of their c i t y . T h e t a l l c u r v e d t o p e c h o e s t h e c o r n o , t h e horned cap the Doge once wore. The six teeth jutting f o r w a r d s t a n d f o r t h e s i x sestieri, the six historic dis- tricts of Venice; the single tooth pointing back stands for the Giudecca across the water; the long S-curve of the whole thing traces the sweep of the Grand Canal, with a lit- tle arch for the Rialto bridge s e t i n t o i t . A v i s i t o r w h o learns to read the fèrro can hold the entire map of Venice in a single glance at a boat's nose. Colors are another element that never changes because gondolas are always painted i n g l o s s y , u n i f o r m b l a c k , because in 1562 the Republic, exasperated by nobles com- peting to out-decorate one another on the water, decreed that every gondola be painted the same sober black and be done with it. The rule out- lived the Republic that made it, but it's funny to think that the dark elegance we now think of as the essence of the gondola began as a sumptu- ary crackdown on rich men's vanity. All of this takes a long time and earns very little, which is why the story of San Trovaso is bittersweet. A single gon- d o l a t a k e s r o u g h l y t w o months to build and runs to tens of thousands of euros, and across all the surviving yards only one or two entirely new gondolas are now made in a year; San Trovaso itself might build one. The rest of the work is repair, scraping, caulking, repainting the four hundred-odd boats still in service, keeping the old ones alive. But that one gondola a y e a r r e m a i n s i m p o r t a n t because, as long as a squera- rol at San Trovaso still lays a n e w k e e l o n t h a t s l o p i n g earthen yard and coaxes eight kinds of wood into a crooked, gleaming, unrepeatable boat, an art that Venice invented has not yet slipped beneath the water. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI Squero di San Trovaso: the last place in Venice where a gondola is still made by hand HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS A craftsman works on the curved wooden hull of a gondola at the Squero di San Trovaso; inset, the distinctive fèrro at the prow carries symbols of Venice's his- tory and geography (AI Assisted)

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