The gondola is first named in a decree of 1094, in which Doge Vitale Falier told the inhabitants of Loreo that they were not obliged to provide one (Camuffo, 2023, para. 1). What that boat looked like is not recorded. The earliest images of a comparable craft are a crescent shaped cymbula in a sixth century mosaic at Ravenna and a small boat towed behind a ship in a twelfth century mosaic in St Mark's Basilica (Camuffo, 2023, para. 39, 41).
From there the boat passed through four shapes. The cymbula type served the marshes and shallow channels until the fifteenth century. The arched type, documented in prints and paintings from 1465 to the end of the sixteenth century, ran about 5.5 to 6 m with a curved gunwale and a removable cabin. The war of the League of Cambrai turned it into a heavy corsair boat with symmetrical ends, and an Arsenal manuscript of around 1550 records one 9.73 m long (Camuffo, 2023, para. 84). The boat then came back to civilian size, gained its iron on the bow and its curl on the stern in the late seventeenth century, and was lengthened again after the Republic fell.
The modern gondola settled at about 11 m long, 140 to 160 cm wide and 65 cm deep in the hull, with a draught of roughly 39 cm (Camuffo, 2023, para. 116, 119, 146). Only the length really moved over the centuries. The width and the depth were fixed by the lagoon itself, by the need to carry two people on a bench without capsizing and to float over mud in water a knee deep. Venice counted around 10,000 gondolas in the sixteenth century against 100,000 citizens, and has an estimated 400 to 500 today (Camuffo, 2023, para. 70, 96).
How old is the gondola, and what came before it?
Written sources name the boat long before anyone drew it. In the sixth century Cassiodorus described Venetians keeping boats tied to their houses as though they were animals, the 1094 decree uses the word gundula, and the Chronicle of Altino of about 1210 records lagoon dwellers owing the Patriarch of Grado a welcome with their gondolas (Camuffo, 2023, para. 1). None of these says how the boat was made, and the etymology of the name has never been settled (Camuffo, 2023, para. 2).
The images fill the gap. A sixth century mosaic in Sant'Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna shows two apostles in a cymbula, a small crescent shaped marsh boat that could not have faced the open sea. A twelfth century mosaic in St Mark's Basilica, showing the relics of Saint Mark being carried from Alexandria, has a ship towing exactly that kind of boat, and a marble relief of the boat builders' trade carved between 1235 and 1250 on the intrados of the basilica's central gate shows four workers around the same hull (Camuffo, 2023, para. 39, 41). A painted panel of 1308 to 1311 by an artist who never worked in Venice shows the type again, which suggests how common it was (Camuffo, 2023, para. 42). The conclusion drawn from this run of evidence is that the Roman cymbula of the Ravenna marshes was the prototype of the gondola (Camuffo, 2023, para. 43).
The war gondola of 1509
The strangest chapter in the boat's history is also the least known, because it was a state secret. The League of Cambrai was formed against Venice on 10 December 1508, and after the defeat at Agnadello on 14 May 1509 the Republic decided to fight by water wherever it could. The Arsenal, a diarist of the time records, began working in great secrecy from 25 October 1509 on a fleet for the rivers, and the Senate issued a public edict in Piazza San Marco authorising citizens to go up the rivers with their own boats and gondolas (Camuffo, 2023, para. 74, 75).
Two requirements reshaped the hull. Boats were lashed together into pontoon bridges, which an arched gunwale makes impossible, so gunwales were flattened and symmetrical rostrums were added at both ends to tie the boats to each other and to the banks against the current (Camuffo, 2023, para. 78). Venetian and Ferrarese boats were otherwise identical on the Po, so a distinctive swan necked bow and stern was needed to tell friend from enemy at a distance (Camuffo, 2023, para. 79).
The only technical record is a reserved manuscript by an Arsenal foreman of about 1550, held at the Marciana library, which gives a gondola 28 Venice feet long (9.73 m), 5 feet wide (174 cm) and 2 feet deep (70 cm), probably rowed by eight men (Camuffo, 2023, para. 83, 84, 85).
How many gondolas were there in Venice?
The numbers from the sixteenth century are startling. A historian writing in 1550 counted over 8,000 gondolas. Thirty years later a Venetian writer put the figure at 9,000 to 10,000, against a population of about 100,000, which is one boat for every ten people (Camuffo, 2023, para. 70, 95).
The same sixteenth century writer explains the boom in practical terms. Before 1500 the streets of Venice were bare earth that turned to mud in the rain. The rich rode horses, which ordinary people could not afford, so Venetians replaced horses with gondolas, which were cheap and had no mud problem. Every wealthy family kept one, everyone else could hire one with its rower, and the boat was gradually improved with awnings and seats (Camuffo, 2023, para. 95).
A fleet that size was more than daily life needed, and that surplus is one of the reasons the military explanation for the sixteenth century redesign holds up (Camuffo, 2023, para. 70, 96). The modern figure is far smaller. Gondolas in service today have been estimated at around 400 to 500 (Camuffo, 2023, para. 96). The oldest one still in Venice was built in 1947 and is kept at the Ca' Rezzonico museum (Camuffo, 2023, para. 120).
Why is the gondola asymmetric?
A gondola is rowed by one person standing on the stern, pushing rather than pulling a single oar against an open wooden rowlock called a forcola. Because the rower stands, the oar above the water forms a long lever arm and the part between water and forcola a short load arm, with a ratio of roughly one to three or one to two, which is what makes moving an 11 m boat by hand reasonable (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26, 28).
That single rower, standing to one side at the back, unbalances the boat. After the fall of the Republic in 1797 the gondola lost its ceremonial role and became public transport with one rower instead of two, and the hull was lengthened to 11 m to hold a straighter line (Camuffo, 2023, para. 116). The skew came later. In the twentieth century builders made the left side longer and wider than the right, and set it against the weight of the bow iron, 12 to 15 kg, so that the boat runs level when loaded and leans when empty (Camuffo, 2023, para. 117).
Each hull is dimensioned for the weight of the gondolier who will own it, which is why a gondola is not a standard product (Camuffo, 2023, para. 117). The traghetto boats that ferry people across the Grand Canal carry two rowers placed diagonally, so they can still be built symmetrical (Camuffo, 2023, para. 30).
Why gondolas look so plain
The sober black boat is the result of sumptuary law. In 1514 the Senate created a magistracy, the Provveditori alle Pompe, to keep public display within limits, and it issued decrees on gondolas in 1562, 1584, 1609, 1628 and 1633 (Camuffo, 2023, para. 35).
The decree of 8 October 1562 prohibited cabins of silk and cloth, required cabins to be made of plain wood in the common manner and lined in raw wool, banned gilding, painting and carving of the cabin and the hull, and forbade the boats' irons to go beyond the norm. The decree of 18 April 1633 went further, banning silk cords and tassels, inlays of ivory, ebony or any wood other than walnut and cheaper species, and metal stern ornaments shaped into figures, pyramids or flowers (Camuffo, 2023, para. 35).
A Senate decree of 1609 is the first written source on the irons themselves. It states that the beaks on the bow and stern irons had been introduced for safety, had drifted into ornament, and were henceforth limited to three inches and required to be blunt (Camuffo, 2023, para. 93). The cabin followed its own path. The early felze was a light frame of two U shaped hoops with marsh reed rods and a cover, seating four; in the eighteenth century it became a rigid wooden cabin with windows and raw wool lining. Tourism removed it altogether, because a paying passenger wants the view (Camuffo, 2023, para. 31, 32, 36).
How a gondola is built in a squero
A gondola is built without plans. The hull is set up on a cantièr, a wooden counter mould anchored to the ground, and the three master ribs are fixed first, working from the stern. Every rib is made of three elements and is cut away from the boat using a sèsto, an empirical jig perfected in the late nineteenth century whose notches give each rib its own curvature and inclination (Caniato, 2022, pp. 200, 207-208).
The materials are specific. The two sérci, the load bearing side boards that run the whole length of the boat, are cut about 2.2 cm thick from an oak trunk 11.5 m long and around 40 cm across, then softened with water and bent over a fire of marsh reeds. Planking is larch and fir, the thwarts are cherry, and the stem and stern posts come from a single elm board chosen with a natural elbow so that no joint is needed. The bow iron weighs from 6 or 7 kg to 20 kg and more, and the builder shapes the hull around it and around the weight of the gondolier who ordered the boat (Caniato, 2022, pp. 200, 207-208).
A finished gondola passes through more than eleven trades, from boatbuilders and oar makers to the blacksmith who forges the iron, the gilder and the tailor who dresses the gondolier (Rossi, 2023, para. 7, 9). Tarred oakum and hot pitch have gone, replaced by marine plywood, resins and stainless screws (Caniato, 2022, p. 202).
What the gondola measures about acqua alta
Because the hull barely changed for seven centuries, the boat works as a flood gauge. The hull is 65 cm deep and about three fifths of that sits below the waterline, a draught of roughly 39 cm, rising to about 52 cm for a docked boat at full load. Rowing adds pitch and roll that a flat bottom cannot damp, so about 10 cm more water is needed in practice, which puts safe navigation at 60 to 70 cm of depth (Camuffo, 2023, para. 146, 148).
Venetian chronicles record the years when the flood was deep enough for gondolas to be rowed across St Mark's Square: 1283, 1600, 1686, 1742, 1746, 1750, 1762, 1770, 1782, 1786, 1821, 1822, 1848, 1864, 1867, 1966 and 2019 (Camuffo, 2023, para. 147). Read through the boat's draught, each of those entries means the water stood 60 to 70 cm above the paving of the square (Camuffo, 2023, para. 148).
That is the practical reason the design never changed much. A boat with a flat bottom and a shallow draught can work canals at low tide and cross a flooded square at high tide, and it is the same quality that rules the gondola out of the open sea in anything beyond flat calm (Camuffo, 2023, para. 152, 158).
