Roberto Dei Rossi has been making gondolas for 40 years, one of only four men in Venice capable of this feat.
Yes indeed, it has been several eternities since I have scribbled a post — though I have written many in my mind, as I watched the pages fall off the calendar and blow away in the wind, etc. etc.
I was entangled in the finishing (“ultimating,” in Italian, which is so cool. They can make verbs out of anything.) of a large and very long-drawn-out project of researching and writing an article on the gondola, and more specifically about Roberto Dei Rossi, who makes them. I started the research in February, 2019, and there were many stops along the way, especially that long one during the three-month lockdown from March to May. The story is now online at “Craftsmanship” magazine.
I’m hoping to get back in the groove now with my blog, for any of you who may still be out there waiting to read….
The gondola’s fundamental secret is its asymmetry. The boat isn’t straight, but that’s what makes it go straight when rowed by one oar. Note: Not paddle, not pole, but an oar.The basic ribs of the gondola, made of three pieces of wood, reveal the inherent shape. The straight bottom piece is made of oak, the side pieces are elm.The gondola is built from the inside out; what look like the boat’s sides are temporary pieces (“serci”) that resist the pressure of construction until it’s time for the permanent sides to be attached.It is not falling over. This is the gondola at rest and it’s built this way to make it easier to maneuver through the narrow canals and even to turn on its own axis without any headway (the only boat that can do this).Most rowing clubs have at least one gondola. This view of a gondola returning to the Remiera Francescana clearly shows the boat’s asymmetry.Certainly there are standard measurements, but the work is done largely by eye, followed by fingers and experience. You will never be able to build a gondola by working merely from a plan; there are too many adjustments to be made and these are only discovered by practice.Of course he knows exactly what he’s looking at and either seeing or not seeing. Some infinitesimal change may be at hand; I never asked while he was working. We’d still be there, a year later, if he were to have stopped every time I wanted to know something.He could have all the tools that were ever made, but this folding metal measuring stick is the one that really counts.I almost never saw him wearing glasses. It began to obsess me.It’s strenuous with power tools? It was even harder without them, especially when gondolas were always built with planks of wood instead of marine plywood. Still, a day here can easily wear you out.Or maybe suffocate you a little, from time to time.The inner surfaces are now full of the points of screws. Well, it’s inside, you may think, what difference does it make?It makes enough of a difference that he has to spend some time now cutting off each point, one by one.Eight different kinds of wood are used to make a gondola.Dei Rossi doesn’t carve the decoration; a master carver executes the designs according to the gondolier’s request.Of course he’s happy — after two months of work, the next new gondola is about to be launched.
Lino’s memories come in all shapes and sizes, though unpacking them is generally less cumbersome than dealing with appliances.
As you know by now, what looks to me like a random person on the vaporetto/street/high seas often carries a cargo of memories for Lino. I get to hear them all, not in any order whatsoever. He seems to review the person’s biography from his mind horizontally.
A few mornings ago we got some seats on the #1 going up the Grand Canal. So far, so surprisingly pleasant. “You see that man over there?” Lino asks.
“The one with the hat?” He was pretty unremarkable, sitting by himself. No hint that he could ever have bubbled like submerged lava with ill-will toward his fellow man. Toward the fellow man sitting right beside me.
The year was sometime between 1965 and the Seventies, and the rio delle Torreselle — the canal behind the Guggenheim Collection — was still home to eleven gondolas. (Now there are two.) Naturally, where there are gondolas, there are gondoliers; Lino, who lived on a very near side-street, would hear them talking in the evening as they came home after work, putting the boats away for the night. The canal was also where Lino kept his little wooden topetta, invisible in this view but up at the end of the row of boats on the left. Idyllic. I’m joking. The story involves gondoliers.
The rio delle Torreselle in a tranquil moment some time in the Seventies; in the Sixties the gondolas were moored in pairs to the fondamenta on the right, and there were no boats on the left side. (mapio.net)
The man on the vaporetto (nickname beginning with “T”) was one of those gondoliers, and tied up his gondola just opposite Lino’s little boat. One day T was seized with the conviction that Lino’s boat was presenting a clear and present danger to the health and well-being of his gondola. Or potential danger. The fact that both were the nearest to the 90-degree curve of the canal might have fomented this notion. But Lino’s boat was about half the size of his, so I suppose if anyone were to be annoyed by its neighbors, it ought to have been the topetta. In any case, NOTHING HAD EVER HAPPENED.
“So he made a formal complaint,” Lino told me. “One day these papers arrive, I have to go to court. He’s claiming one million lire in damage to his boat. I said ‘I don’t even know what a million lire are.’ (Note: It would have been $618 in today’s money, but back then it was way more than a month’s salary.) My lawyer friend saw me looking glum and I told him about all this, and he said ‘Give me all the papers, I’ll take care of it.'”
So a few days later the court sent a surveyor to measure the combatants (the boats, I mean, not the men). “The surveyor is working away,” Lino went on, “and I was saying to T, ‘They’re just boats made of wood! Don’t you have any bigger problems than this? You’ve got your old mother at home to look after…’ And the surveyor is listening as he’s writing his notes. And he turns to me and says, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.'”
The case was dismissed, and T had to pay the costs. “Then my lawyer friend said, ‘Now we’re going to go ahead and sue for moral damages.’ And I said ‘No, for the love of God, just let it go.'”
That would be enough to remember, but there’s more in the album. “He had a sister, she was unbelievably beautiful. I had such a crush on her when I was 15, I would just tremble when I saw her. I’d stand beneath her window hoping to get a glimpse of her. I never said a word to her, ever… His father was a gondolier too. A big strong man (‘grande, grosso…’). Finished third in the Regata Storica, or maybe it was fourth, I can’t remember the year. I’ve got some papers about it at home somewhere.”
So everyone lived happily ever after? I guess so, in their Venetian way. Lino went on with his life, and when T retired he took his precious gondola someplace and sawed it up into pieces. “He could have sold it, but he had all the money he needed anyway, he owned houses, he wasn’t married. But no, he just went and cut it all up. That’s a normal person?”
I know it seems like I just got back, so to speak, but Christmas is bearing down on us and we are fleeing to the mountains where we will alternately celebrate and combat it with cheese, apple strudel, needlepoint, TV, hiking, and sleep.
Happy holidays to everyone who reads my scribbles. You have made this a wonderful year for me.
A view from the Rialto Bridge. I took this on a morning in April, 2009 — nowhere near the height of the tourist season, but this gives you a rough picture of the space available and the dimensions of the daily vehicles. At this instant the commercial traffic was momentarily light (I could have stood there all morning making pictures, but time was short). What’s useful about this image is the number of vaporettos visible in the space between the Rialto stop on the left and San Silvestro on the right, a distance of 409 feet (125 meters) between the two closest docks, and 669 feet (204 meters) between the furthest. The distance between the starboard side of the vaporetto on the left and the stern of the gondolas on the right is 67 feet (20 meters). This picture doesn’t show all the additional vaporettos which are out there now: The #2, the “Vaporetto dell’Arte,” and the Alilaguna airport bus. There are usually at least two of each arriving or leaving, going up- or downstream. There can be as few as three minutes between dockings of one vehicle or another, the paper reported. My personal experience is that there can be a boat ready to tie up to the dock as soon as the previous boat has left enough space. If anyone is interested, a vaporetto on the average is 69 feet (21 meters) long, and 13 feet (4 meters) wide. I don’t think you have to be Archimedes or Euclid to appreciate the problems of this geometry.
I will correct my earlier post, but as the details begin to come into sharper focus, I want to report that the gondola with the German family did not capsize, so I can’t interpret early reports on the gondoliers diving into the Canal. Of course they did what they could to help, but the boat remained upright, if damaged.
I know that the gondoliers recovered some small floating objects belonging to the littlest girl, and placed them on the fatal dock with a bouquet of flowers: one small rubber duck, and one very small pink shoe.
The gondoliers have carried their proposals to City Hall: To start with, a ban on any vehicle overtaking any other vehicle. Vaporettos in line, taxis in line, gondolas in line. (I don’t know about barges.) As anyone who has seen the Grand Canal knows, this procedure has not been the case so far. I have no opinion on the feasibility of the idea but presume that men who spend all day in the area know something about how things work.
They are also proposing revisions of the vaporetto schedules, to prevent backups such as the one which contributed to the disaster (three vaporettos were idling in sequence, awaiting their turn to use their respective ACTV docks). That would seem to be a no-brainer.
Hence another correction to my report: The fatal vaporetto was not moving slowly; it wasn’t moving at all, until it was time to engage the gears to move forward, which involved backing up first, which was the point at which the gondola was struck.
Two other vaporetto drivers have also become involved in the legal situation. I don’t know what the formal accusations are. I could know, but I am not following every single sentence being written about the case. The important thing isn’t what’s being said today, but what is done tomorrow. Or next year. Or whenever or if anything is actually done.
If something meaningful occurs, I’ll try to let you know.
