The image of a male gondolier rowing you along Venice’s crowded Grand Canal is a classic one. But why not learn to row the batela yourself with a lesson from a female gondolier? Sarah Rodrigues heads to the often-crowded Italian city to cruise the quieter, lesser-visited ‘back street’ canals.
“And forward … and pull … and forward … and pull.”
Standing by the side of a mercifully quiet canal in Venice’s Cannaregio district, I feel unutterably daft as I lunge forward, arms stretched in front of me, and then rock onto my back foot, elbows tucked tightly into my waist. But then, perhaps not as daft as I’m about to feel once I take to the water.
The relative emptiness of my surroundings shows a rarely-seen side of Venice. This is, after all, a city that’s become almost as synonymous with overcrowding, tick-box tourism and the demise of local culture as it has with its canalside setting and crumbling Gothic architecture. Here, however, the streets bordering the waterways chatter with the brisk clip of sensible, square heels as women drag shopping trolleys behind them.
In a few hours, the neighborhood will echo with the cacophony of children set free from lessons. This area is one of the last bastions of residential life in La Serenissima, the city’s historic nickname. I’d barely noticed it at the time, but now that I think about it, the tables outside the cafés I’d walked past on the way to my lesson had been remarkably devoid of iPhones and pouts: I’d seen, instead, unruly eyebrows, pluming cigarette smoke, and creased copies of the daily paper, Corriere della Sera.
My instructor is Jane Caporal, a British-Australian; her Aussie accent is pronounced when speaking English. Married to an Italian, a short stint in Venice while her husband was carrying out some academic research has now lasted for more than 30 years. Venice is home and where her two sons have been raised. It’s also where Jane learned to row.
“We rented an apartment on the Grand Canal when we first moved here,” she recalls. “It was from there that I watched my first ever Regata Storica.” Held in the first week of September, this prestigious event is the highlight of the Venetian ‘voga alla Veneta’ (the city’s ancient, stand-up rowing technique) calendar, featuring a water-based parade and a series of competitive events. Inspired, says Jane, she joined one of the local rowing clubs and, despite coming to the sport later in life, is now a multi-award winning champion.
But her love of voga isn’t limited to celebrating her own successes: Jane is the founder and president of Row Venice, an all-female, nonprofit initiative committed to preserving the sport, and making the experience available to tourists. In doing so, the organization also draws attention to the often-unsung role of women as rowers—in a city where the activity seems traditionally and stubbornly male.
“There was this notion that it was somehow disrespectful to commercialize an honored tradition. Even worse that it was a woman doing it.”
- Jane Caporal, Row Venice
Just a 20-minute walk away, around the Rialto Bridge in Venice’s crowded center, boater-topped men cluster near bridges, biceps bulging beneath striped sleeves—although, as Jane tells me, the power to row comes from the movement of your body, not from your arms. Their presence is as unmistakable as the long forms and sleek curves of the gondolas they steer around tight corners, calling out “Oè!” to warn others of their approach.
So interwoven is machismo with being a gondolier that in 2009, when Giorgia Boscolo became the first female to have ever been added to the official register of licensees, she made headlines the world over. In her 20s at the time, Boscolo said she’d gained her love of the tradition from her father, who’d worked as a gondolier for around 40 years. And qualifying as a gondolier really is a labor of love, requiring 400 hours of training covering history, art, foreign languages and navigation—as well, of course, rigorous practical instruction.
As we push off down the canal, my female position in the ‘batela coda di gambero’—which literally translates to ‘shrimp-tail boat,’ a reference to the narrow point of its stern—feels all the more remarkable, especially as there are so few of these traditional boats still in existence: Only 10, of which four are used by Row Venice.
“Old paintings show the extent to which batele used to populate the Venetian waterways,” says Jane. Traditionally used for the transportation of goods, these wooden workhorses are, she says, prized for their width and stability, which makes them ideal for beginners, but the introduction of motorized boats, post WWII, has caused their numbers to dwindle dramatically. It’s the same story for gondolas: today, only around 400 remain, compared with 10,000 in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Gondolas may far outnumber the batele, but there’s so much more to Venetian rowing than gondoliers, Jane tells me. Warned that her boat would be burned when she first set up Row Venice, her impatience with entrenched ‘old boys’ attitudes is both feisty and dismissive. “There was this notion that it was somehow disrespectful to commercialize an honored tradition,” she says. “Even worse that it was a woman doing it.”
When Row Venice first started up, the instructors would be shouted at by men. “I mean, it was ridiculous. They’d be accusing them of damaging their boats, even when they weren’t rowing anywhere near them.” The rivalry has died down considerably now, she says. “I guess our shared dislike of motorboats gives us some kind of a bond.”
In any case, says Jane, women have always rowed in Venice. “Take prostitutes, for example; they used to row between assignments in boats called mascareta. They supposedly got their name from the word maschera—mask—which the women would wear to conceal their identity.” Women rowed competitively too. A 1610 engraving by Giacomo Franco shows them racing, and the writings of the 14th-century nobleman Nicolò Zeno detail regattas in which women participated. “And what about daily practicalities?” she continues. “Venice is formed of over 100 islands beyond the centro storico (historic center), and women from agricultural outliers such as Sant’Erasmo, Torcello and Giudecca, would have historically rowed their goods in to sell at the Rialto Market.” Inevitably, the practical aspect of rowing fed into the competitive one.
A prime example is Maria Boscola da Marina, immortalized in an 18th-century painting attributed to the Venetian School and now housed in the Museo Correr. She won five regattas over a 40-year period from 1740, as well as having five children and a farm in Chioggia, 25 kilometers south. In a caorlina, a long narrow boat with a curved bow and stern, she’d row the 50-kilometer round trip each Saturday to sell her produce—onions, artichokes, squash and potatoes—in the market. No wonder her arms were so race-worthy.
Today, however, the only sack of potatoes in my batela appears to be me. Jane stands in the raised section of the stern, the poppa, deftly steering us along the water, where crumbling pastel façades tremble—along with my nerves.
I’ve just about mastered the grip, with my fingers resting on top of the oar as my wrists roll through the push-pull action, but my oar keeps popping out of the forcola, the wooden oarlock. Unsurprisingly, we’re still gliding smoothly along. I’m under no illusions why: Jane is doing all the work. I’ve only ever rowed seated, and with two oars at that, so I’m curious to know how gondoliers keep course with just one. I learn that the trick lies in making the oar work as a rudder: Dip it vertically, push it to the rear, and then let it drag underwater, back to where it first entered.
If there’s a word that springs to mind during my 90 minutes with Jane, it’s ‘undeterrable.’
I have to remind myself not to lift the oar out of the canal; the resistance of the return movement feels odd at first, but it’s not long before I’m enjoying the sensation of being an active participant in my sightseeing. The quiet glide of the vessel, the slight chill when we pass under a bridge, the relative silence, broken occasionally by the squawk of a gull. Why, I wonder, would you want to join the hectic throngs in Piazza San Marco when you could be doing this?
It’s time to switch positions. I step awkwardly onto the poppa, place one foot in front of the other and, with nothing but water on either side of me, am surprised by how stable I feel. Quite poised, in fact. Added to which, the tourists dangling from bridges with their cameras are rapidly bringing out my inner show-off—not to mention the dapper gentleman who blew me a kiss and called out “Brava, bellissima!”
What old boys’ club, eh?
I can’t allow myself to get too cocky, though—Jane’s explanation about how these batele are ideal for novices is still fresh in my mind. Sturdy and reliable as they are, however, they’re also beautifully elegant. It’s a pity that so few of them still exist.
They’re so rare, in fact, that when one of Jane’s original boats went up in flames—yes, it happened, although as collateral damage, not a targeted attack—she had to source blueprints from a naval museum to rebuild it.
If there’s a word that springs to mind during my 90 minutes with Jane, it’s ‘undeterrable.’ Having not picked up the oar until her late 40s, she’s gone on to win several rowing trophies, both in the mascareta (women’s doubles) and pupparino (women’s singles). She’s also made numerous appearances in the Regata Storica. Perhaps even more importantly, she’s helping to keep an ancient Venetian tradition alive.
“The culture was dying out,” she says, recalling dwindling rowing club numbers and ageing memberships. Her desire to keep the tradition alive for future generations has seen her employ female rowers to teach tourists, and to funnel all profit back into raising the profile of the sport, sponsoring athletes and races throughout the Venetian rowing season, which runs from April until September.
And money talks. In 2021, female rowers in the Regata Storica were, for the first time ever, awarded the same prize money as men. By comparison at the 2019 event, women won under EUR€1,000 (USD$1,180) while men received in excess of EUR€1,700 (USD$2,000).
Even without knowing that your tourist dollars are achieving positive things, the experience of voga—stand-up rowing—in Venice is undeniably special. This is a city built on water, and constructed for its grandeur to be admired by approaching ships. Its continued existence, even when it comes to activities as prosaic as rubbish collection, is entirely dependent on that shallow lagoon and those narrow waterways.
As many times as I’ve walked Venice’s alleys, crossed its bridges and peered into its canals, I realize I’ve only ever been an observer. Today, steering from the back of a batela, I feel that I’ve stepped into its canvas.
The writer self-funded her experience with Row Venice which aims to preserve and share the unique tradition of Venetian rowing.
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Sarah Rodrigues is an award-winning London-based Australian freelance travel writer, published in The Guardian, the Telegraph, Condé Nast Traveller and many others, who loves to tell stories with a human or historical element. She holds an Advanced PADI qualification, has climbed Bolivia’s’ highest mountain and snowboarded in both hemispheres, but is equally at home in city settings. With a passion for sustainable fashion and vintage homewares, this inevitably includes a visit to the local fleamarket.
