René Seindal

Photo from evening paddle on October 24th, 2009, taken in Rio di S.Giovanni Laterano.

Last Sunday I was supposed to meet with Angela Nickerson, an American travel writer I’ve met via the social networking site Twitter, to talk about Venice and kayaking and much else. Two other ‘Tweeps’ were invited too, Nan McElroy and Monica Ceserato.

Nan McElroy is an American travel author who lives in Venice for some years. Venetian rowing, Voga alla Veneta, has become her great passion, and she is very active in promoting Voga alla Veneta in Venice. Her latest endeavour is the cultural association VIVA which has the aim promoting Voga alla Veneta and ameliorating the conditions for traditional rowing boats in Venice, where motorised traffic have made rowing much more difficult.

Monica Ceserato is Venetian from the mainland, where she runs a B&B in the small town of Malcontenta, 15 minutes by bus from Venice, and does Italian classes for foreigners and English classes for locals. Monica came along with her British husband Chris and their son Pasquale.

When I arrived at the meeting point, the bar Al Timon in Cannaregio, I found a message on my phone that Angela had been taken ill so the meeting was cancelled. However, both Monica and I had made the journey, so we decided to meet anyway to chat and get to know each other.

Nan had promised Angela a tour in a new boat VIVA had acquired, a beautiful sandolo buraneo. The sandoli forms a whole family of traditional Venetian boats, mostly from around the northern lagoon, and the sandolo buraneo – or rather the sandolo grando da buranèi – was used around the island of Burano, some 8km north of Venice, for fishing and transportation of goods and persons. Now it is mostly used, painted black and decorated beyond recognition with seats and figurines, for a gondola-like tourist service in the city of Venice. The sandolisti sit at their stations throughout the city centre, calling out ‘gondola, gondola’ at passing tourists, though their boat is nothing like a gondola to even an untrained eye.

Nan decided to do the boat ride anyway, without Angela, so she went to find a rowing mate and fetch the boat. After a while she returned with Amelia in the boat.

There was quite a bit of current in the canal, due to the changing tide, and the two girls rowing had to work hard. They rowed us through the Cannaregio area, down the Rio della Misericordia and the Rio Noale to the Canal Grande.

From there we continued towards the Rialto Bridge.

Even though I haven’t rowed much this summer, Nan let me have a go at rowing a bit down the Canal Grande. I’m in no way an expert rower, but it worked OK and it was good fun.

With Amelia back at the front oar we went up the Rio S. Polo, Rio S. Agostino, Rio S. Giacomo dell’Orio and Rio S. Zan Degolà to Canal Grande, across and down the Rio S. Maddalena where the current played games with the boat again.

We stopped at S. Maddalena for cicchetti and a drink.

Monica, husband and son said goodbye here and walked to Piazzale Roma to catch a bus back to the mainland where they live. I continued with Nan and Amelia to moor the boat at its spot in the Rio della Madonna dell’Orto.

Unfortunately a motorboat had usurped the boat’s mooring. While we waited for the owner of the motorboat to return, the girls spend a bit of time finding an place to unload the stuff on board. Just as we had given up waiting and had started to move the motorboat to another mooring, the owner appeared to remove his boat.

Amazingly, the tour was a first for Monica and her family. Though Monica is Venetian by birth, she’s from the mainland, and none of them had ever toured Venice in a boat before.

That part of the experience wasn’t new to me, as I spend more time in Venice in a boat than on land, but the tour was a first for me too. It is the first time ever I have rowed Venetian style in the city of Venice and on the Canal Grande.

Links

Angela Nickerson:

• Gypsy Guide
• Twitter

Nan McElroy:

• Living Venice
• VIVA
• Twitter

Monica Ceserato:

• Faronhof B&B
• Tutor of English and Italian
• Twitter

A couple of weeks ago I made a map of the rii of Venice where I had never been paddling – I had made a few mistakes which I have updated on the original post.

Since then I have looked for occasions to paddle through some of the few remaining rii, and the list has been shortened considerably, as of this map.

The remaining un-paddled rii are:

1. Rio dei Meloni, S.Polo (N part only, there’s an unpassable bridge in the middle)
2. Riello S.Sofia, Cannaregio (dead end)
3. Rio dell’Arsenale, Castello (dead end at the Celestia vaporetto stop)
4. Canale delle Galeazze, Castello (inside the Arsenale – navy area)
5. Darsena Arsenale Vecchio, Castello (inside the Arsenale – navy area)
6. Canale Sacca Fisola (Giudecca)
7. two nameless canals on Sacca Fisola and Sacca S.Biagio.

These rii have been traversed since last:

1. Rio di S.Giobbe, Cannaregio
2. Rio S. Maria Maggiore, Dorsoduro (both parts)
3. Rio delle Burchielle, Dorsoduro
4. Rio della Cazziola, Dorsoduro (only kayaks can get through)
5. Rio Briati, Dorsoduro
6. Rio delle Erbe, S.Polo
7. Rio S.Michiel, S.Marco

I have taken the liberty of keeping Rio S.Andrea out of the tally, as it is completely closed off at this time. Half of it is interred, and the other half is currently without water.

Rowing a gondola at high tide requires some special skills. The higher water makes for lower bridges, and a gondola is not a low profile boat that’ll just go under anyway. The gondoliere have to do all sorts of weird manoeuvres to get the boat under the lowest of the bridges.

Crouching

The simplest way of lowering the height of the gondola is for the gondoliere to crouch on the back deck, while he keeps the oar straight backwards, propelling the boat with a sculling movement. The forcola, or oarlock, has a bend exactly to allow the operation where the oar is almost parallel to the boat.

Another example of the crouching gondoliere, same place near Santa Maria Formosa:

Edging

If the bridge is very low, the gondoliere might have to edge to boat to lower the stern ferro, which is the highest point of a gondola. He will do so by stepping over to the right side of the boat, in front of the forcola. From that position he will scull the boat forwards. On many gondolas the stern ferro is on hinges, so it can be flipped down. If the bridge is too low for even the bow ferro the pass, he will have to edge the boat even more, by telling the passengers to all sit on the right side of the boat.

From Rio del Mondo Nuovo, near Santa Maria Formosa:

Lying down

At times the gondoliere will have to pass a bridge where there’s just only enough space to squeeze through, and to make sure that he will not get stuck, with ferri scraping the underside of the bridge, he will lie down on the back deck of the gondola, and push it along with his hands until the stern ferro is well through the passage.

From Rio San Provolo, S.Marco:

And another case from Rio della Maddalena, Cannaregio:

Venice is said to have some 150 canals, and on top of that a lot of canals were interred in the 19th century for various reasons.

I was recently asked if I had paddled all the canals of Venice, and I haven’t. There are parts of Venice with unpleasant traffic or just run down places where you don’t go unless you have to, and even if I have been to many of those places too, there’s still a handful of canals I haven’t paddled through yet.

To get an idea of how much of Venice I’ve paddled I’ve marked in light red the waterways where I haven’t been, on this map.

Maybe half the unexplored canals are dead ends where you’d have to back out again because there’s no room to turn around. One is military and has a chain across to keep boats out. The canals near Piazzale Roma and Canale Scomenzera are places where I would never take anybody unless I was really certain of their paddling skills, because of the heavy traffic there. Those are the places where goods are loaded from trucks to cargo boats and vice versa.

In July this year, I saw this gondola stopping to let clients disembark at Campo San Barbaba in the Dorsoduro sestiere, and it immediately caught my eye as different.

Watch the foredeck,

and in particular the little figure often placed there.

No an angel, not a little soldier, not a little holder for a few flowers, but a Buddha.

I had a chat with the gondoliere, and when I asked why he had a Buddha and not an angle like most others, he just replied that “that was his religion”.

Here’s another photo of the figure taken the gondola station at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

I have talked to a few other gondolieri about it, and they have told me that there is another Buddhist gondoliere around, who has a Ganesh (the Elephant god) on the foredeck, but that he’s working off San Marco where it is harder to spot little details like that on the boats. In any case, I’ve never noticed that boat around.

The local above average size lagoon mammal can have a bad day. If the weather is foul, he is foul too.

Some people won’t renounce their gondola ride, not even if its raining cats, dogs and medium sized lagoon elephants.

Photos from Rio di Santa Marina, on September 14th, 2009 – a fairly humid day in Venice.

The average depth of the Lagoon of Venice is not much, about 1.2m when the tide is at the historical zero mark, but much of the lagoon is a lot more shallow than that.

The tidal difference can be up to 1.5m, from about 0.5m below the historical zero mark to 1m above, so it is not always easy to know if you can actually pass a certain spot in the lagoon at a given level of tide.

Sometimes we make mistakes and we’ll have to do the lagoon walk: