The Venetian Gondola Site Features

A gondola is built in a squero, a boatyard with a sloped timber ramp running down to the water, and the trade is unusual in having no drawings: dimensions are held by the builder and set out directly on the timber. A yard needs a bank shallow enough to haul a hull out, which is why the few surviving squeri sit where they do -- San Trovaso on its own rio, and a small number of others in Dorsoduro and on Giudecca.

Eight woods go into a single hull, each chosen for a property rather than for appearance -- oak for the ribs, elm where wear matters, larch and fir for planking, walnut, cherry, lime and mahogany for the fittings. Some 280 separate pieces are involved, and a hull takes months.

The two most demanding components are made by a separate craftsman, the remer: the forcola, the oarlock, carved from a single block of walnut into a twisting form that offers around eight distinct rowing positions, and the oar itself, about four metres of beech.

The squero di San Trovaso in Dorsoduro is the best known of the surviving yards and the easiest to see, its wooden buildings looking more Alpine than Venetian -- the boatbuilders originally came down from the Cadore forests that supplied the timber, and built in the style they knew.

An asymmetrical hull

A gondola's hull is deliberately built asymmetrically, with one side slightly longer than the other -- a refinement that took shape over the 19th century as boatbuilders worked out the proportions needed for a single gondolier, rowing from one side only, to keep the boat moving in a straight line rather than veering off course.

The flat bottom is the other half of that logic. It gives the boat a draught of a few dozen centimetres, which is what a lagoon mostly under a metre deep requires: a keeled hull would ground on the mudflats that surface at low tide, and would not clear the low bridges of the inner canals.

Rowing with a single oar

A gondolier propels and steers the boat with a single oar, resting against a carved wooden oarlock called the forcola. The forcola's asymmetric, twisting shape allows the oar to be braced in as many as eight different positions, giving the gondolier enough control to row forward, slow down, turn, or reverse without needing a second oar or a rudder.

The ferro

The distinctive metal ornament on a gondola's prow, the ferro, does more than balance the boat: its six forward-facing prongs are said to represent Venice's six historic districts (sestieri), while a seventh, curved prong at the back stands for the island of Giudecca, and the ferro's own curved profile echoes the bend of the Grand Canal. Traditional gondolas are built from eight different types of wood, each chosen for a specific structural role -- some for flexibility, others for water resistance or strength.