Squero di San Trovaso
Why is it significant?
Across the canal, look at the wooden house with flowers on its balconies, the dark sheds, and the boats hauled up on a sloping ramp at the water's edge. It looks like a mountain chalet that took a wrong turn.
Key Facts
| Place | Squero di San Trovaso |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo San Trovaso, Dorsoduro 1097, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43030, 12.32600 |
| Part of Walk | Art on the Water: Dorsoduro, the Accademia and the Zattere in Venice |
| Generated | Generated |
Across the canal, look at the wooden house with flowers on its balconies, the dark sheds, and the boats hauled up on a sloping ramp at the water's edge. It looks like a mountain chalet that took a wrong turn. This is the Squero di San Trovaso, one of the oldest yards in Venice still building and repairing gondolas.
The chalet look is no accident. Many of the craftsmen who worked in the squeri, and the timber they worked with, came down from the mountains of Cadore, and they built their workshops the way they built at home. The yard goes back to the seventeenth century, and it is still a working place, not a museum, so admire it from this side of the canal and let the craftsmen get on with it.
A gondola is a small miracle. It is around eleven metres long, assembled from roughly two hundred and eighty pieces of wood of eight different kinds, oak, elm, larch, lime, fir and others, and it is deliberately lopsided. The left side is wider than the right by about twenty-four centimetres, so that the boat runs straight even though the gondolier rows on one side only. Watch one from behind and you will see it lean, as if it were always about to turn.
And why black? The usual story is that the Republic's sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century put an end to the ruinous competition among nobles to own the most gilded, most colourful boat, and black became the rule. In those days there were thousands of gondolas on the canals. Today there are only a few hundred, and just a handful of squeri still know how to build one from scratch.
Beside you stands the church of San Trovaso, with two almost identical façades. The story goes that this let the two great rival factions of Venice, the Castellani and the Nicolotti, each enter by their own door without meeting. Keep that rivalry in mind. Now head back down to the Zattere and follow the waterfront west for about ten minutes, then turn right along the Rio di San Sebastiano to the church of the same name.