Squero di San Trovaso Historical Timeline

Origins

A squero, or boatyard, has occupied this stretch of the Rio di San Trovaso since around 1600, making it one of the oldest continuously working boatyards in the city. Its wooden buildings, with their sloped roofs and open galleries, were built in the Tyrolean style favored by the boatbuilders who traditionally came from the Cadore area of the Dolomites to work here.

Turning points

The squero's busiest period came when Venice's waterways carried more than 10,000 vessels, and San Trovaso alone employed around 60 boat builders to keep the fleet in repair. Gondolas built here, and at the handful of other surviving squeri, are still assembled from roughly 280 individual pieces of wood -- oak for strength, fir for flexibility, cherry for its finish, larch for water resistance, lime for carving detail, walnut for durability, mahogany for elegance, and elm for the boat's curved sections.

Influential people

No single builder's name defines the Squero di San Trovaso the way an architect's would a palace -- its identity comes instead from generations of craftsmen who passed the same techniques down largely unchanged, nailing rather than gluing each hull together and still shaping curved timbers using water and fire rather than machinery.

Cultural evolution

As motorboats and the automobile reduced the practical need for gondolas, demand for new boats collapsed from thousands a year to a small handful, and only a few squeri, San Trovaso among them, survived where dozens once operated across the city.

Present-day significance

Today only around ten new gondolas are built across all of Venice's surviving squeri each year, each one taking two to three months of daily work by hand -- making San Trovaso one of the last places on earth still building a working boat this way, from the keel up.