Squero di San Trovaso Site Features

The squero does not look Venetian, and that is the most informative thing about it. The buildings are timber, two storeys, with pitched roofs and open galleries along the upper floor -- the vernacular of the Cadore valleys in the Dolomites, built here by the boatbuilders who came down from there and stayed.

Venice built in brick and Istrian stone because it had no timber of its own; the wood came downriver from the mountains, and so did the men who worked it. The sheds are what happens when a mountain building tradition is set down on a lagoon fondamenta.

The form follows the work. The yard slopes directly into the Rio di San Trovaso so hulls can be run down into the water, and the sheds are open-sided so boats can be moved in and out and worked on under cover. There is no facade in any Venetian sense -- the front is a working slipway.

Behind it, the house is where the boatbuilding family lived above the workshop, which is why the upper storey has balconies and the ground floor has none.

The boatyard's Tyrolean-style wooden sheds, unlike anything else along the canal, are themselves worth the stop, but the real draw is watching the actual boatbuilding work in progress -- hulls under construction, timbers being steamed and bent, and finished gondolas awaiting their final black lacquer, all visible from the fondamenta across the narrow Rio di San Trovaso.

The squero sits on the Rio di San Trovaso in Dorsoduro, a couple of minutes from the Zattere and a short walk from the Accademia.

It is best seen from the Fondamenta Nani directly opposite, across a canal narrow enough that the work inside the sheds is legible from the other bank. There is no approach from the yard's own side, and none is needed.

The setting is ordinary residential Dorsoduro -- houses, a bacaro or two, a church -- so the sheds come as a genuine anomaly in the streetscape rather than as a preserved exhibit with signage.

Its position on a side canal a short row from the Giudecca Canal is why a boatyard has been here since about 1600: close enough to the open water to launch, sheltered enough to work.

The Zattere and Gardella's Casa alle Zattere are five minutes south, the Accademia five minutes east, so the squero fits naturally into a walk rather than a trip.