FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Meet the goddesses of gondoleering

Meet the goddesses of gondoleering

The dying crafts and skills of Venice might yet live on if a dedicated group of ladies has its way

“BIG WAVE incoming, use your legs!” shouts Gabriella Lazzari, as her laughing students try out their new gondoleering skills in the sunshine of Venice’s lagoon.
Lazzari is one of about 20 women who teach tourists from around the world how to row standing up, Venetian style, in batela coda di gambero – shrimp-tailed wooden boats.
“We take them out to the lagoon so they can do the gondoleering part without crashing into everybody,” quips Jane Caporal, who founded the Row Venice organisation more than eight years ago in a bid to save the voga alla veneta style of rowing.
“Obviously Venice is motorised now, so people don’t row around in their little boats anymore.”
“The idea is to save the tradition, not just the actual rowing but everything – the boat building, the oar making, the forcola [oar rowlock] making – crafts that have been going for centuries and centuries,” Caporal said.

Meet the goddesses of gondoleering

Leading the lessons is Gabriella Lazzari, left, a member of Row Venice, a nonprofit organisation of passionate women and expert vogatrici (rowers). 
Yezi Jin, an accountant back home, shrieks in delight as she drives the blade into the water and propels the boat forwards, far from the peaceful canals of Italy’s floating city, in the vast open waters where vaporetto waterbuses sail back and forth.
“It’s hard work, my back’s aching, but it’s great fun!” says the 32-year old from Portland in the United States as her husband, gripping his own oar tightly, tries valiantly to match her pace.
“We see all the islands here. It’s very different from the Rialto Bridge or being in the crowds,” Jin adds.
Most of the women who teach voga also race professionally, and Row Venice sponsors them.
Caporal sees it as a way of attempting to level the playing field in a sport and profession dominated by men.
There is currently only one female gondolier in the whole city. She has had to fight tooth and claw for her share of the 20 million tourists who visit the Serenissima each year, Caporal says.
“The number of people certified as gondoliers is controlled by the gondoliers’ association. It’s a tightly closed shop. With Row Venice we’ve carved out a space for women to work too.”
The British-born Australian, who has lived in Venice for 30 years, picked the batela – a traditional work-boat now out of production – because it is more stable than the asymmetrical gondola and easier to manoeuvre.
“I came across one that was sold to me by a rowing club – it had been out of use for years. It was made by a master craftsman who had seen this kind of boat as a boy and remembered it,” she says.

Meet the goddesses of gondoleering

Britishborn Australian Jane Caporal founded Row Venice more than eight years ago in a bid to save the voga alla veneta style of rowing. /AFP  
The former stock analyst fell in love with it and was ready to shell out 14,000 euros (Bt437,000) for a replica to be made.
But the master craftsman had died. With no one left alive who knew how to make them, the boat builders had to get the plans from the city’s naval history museum.
“It’s a pleasure to enable tourists to live Venice by water and explain the pollution and high-water problems,” says Lazzari, in reference to the damage that cruise ships cause to the fragile ecosystem and floods that leave Saint Mark’s Square underwater.
Just a week ago a massive cruise ship lost control, crashing into the wharf and sparking fresh controversy over the damage the huge vessels cause to the city. 
“I tell them about the types of boat there used to be, like the mascareta, so-called because it was used by masked ‘working women’, and the gondolas, which were the taxis of the rich,” Lazzari says.
The doges of Venice, the republic’s rulers until the 18th century, boasted golden, two-deck ships that were used yearly in a “Marriage of the Sea” ceremony, which symbolically wedded Venice to the water.
Row Venice pays tribute to the carnival city’s heyday by sponsoring parties held on boats in the lagoon on summer nights.
By day, its craft glide peacefully past ducks diving for crabs and disused boatyards transformed into canal-side gardens.
“It was a dream come true,” says Alice Hendricks, 71, her eyes sparkling as she gets out of the batela after her first lesson.
“It was very challenging. It looks so easy when you watch the gondolieri doing it, but after a few tries you kind of get a feeling for it. It’s a joy.”
 

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