Venice Without the Gondola: Rowing, Bacari and Workshop Doors

Seven years before I finally reached Venice, I spent a summer at my grandmother's house on another continent, daydreaming about a conference I hoped to attend there. I pictured the city as a set of small islands where you would need a boat simply to get from the venue to your bed. The clearest image I kept was a slow-motion one: wind on my face, dress moving, water everywhere, a boat the only way forward. The conference fell through and the dream went quiet.

Can any city really be that lovely, I asked myself afterwards. Then came Easter 2017. I had been living in Europe for five years by then and I finally bought a train ticket. When I walked out of Santa Lucia station, the canal was in front of me, the Church of San Simeone Piccolo behind it, and no buses or trams anywhere. I made a small, undignified noise and understood that my teenage imagination had actually undersold the place.

What follows is not a list of sights. It is what I did instead of queuing for a gondola: an evening spent learning to row a traditional boat, meeting the people who make and repair them, and finishing in the bacari — the local wine bars — of Cannaregio.

I wanted the makers, not the monuments

The older I get, the less interested I am in the top-ten version of a city. Before I arrived I knew that what would stay with me was conversation: not a gondola ride as such, but the person who builds them; not a mask from a shop window, but the workshop where it was made and the routine of the man who made it.

That instinct led me to Wanderjack Italy, a small outfit designing personal experiences in the Veneto and in Sicily with local communities at the centre of the plan. For my first evening they invited me along on the Sailing Bacaro Experience run with Venice on Board. The invitation promised craftsmen and a rowing lesson. A bacaro, for anyone who has not met the word, is a neighbourhood wine bar, and the cicchetti served in them are small snacks in the spirit of Spanish tapas.

One number to carry with you: Venice is made of 118 islands, joined by bridges and canals. I have repeated that fact to people ever since and it still sounds invented.

What a gondola really costs

Gondolas are the boats on every postcard. What I had not known is that they were once the transport of the wealthy, and that the economics still reflect it. Building one and obtaining a gondolier's licence costs something in the region of 20,000 euros. A ride works out at about 80 euros for half an hour, shared between up to six passengers.

There were fifteen other kinds of Venetian boat in use in the past. One is no longer built at all, and several others survive only in small numbers, because attention and money both flow towards the gondola. That is the trade-off of a famous boat: the rest of the fleet quietly thins out.

A quiet turn off the main road

Elena, my local host and the founder of Wanderjack, met me at Santa Lucia among the arrivals and led me away from the crowds, through Cannaregio, towards the Venice on Board workshop. Within minutes the noise fell away. We were in the narrow lanes of the former Jewish Ghetto, and the change was so abrupt it felt staged — one turn and the city stopped performing.

Where a rowlock is a work of art

The workshop I visited makes forcolas: the carved wooden rowlocks that hold and pivot an oar. It had genuinely never occurred to me that a boat is the product of several separate trades. Hulls come from one workshop, oars from another, forcolas from a third. The height and angle of a fórcola change the way a boat rows, so each owner needs one shaped for them.

I was to take out a Topa, one of the traditional flat-bottomed boats, and cross the Cannaregio canal to the bar. The money from these outings goes towards restoring older boats and supporting the craftsmen who keep the skills alive. While I was there I met a man rebuilding a gondola and asked how long the job would take. I had no idea what to expect. Eight months, he said, more or less.

The hour I spent pretending to be competent

I am clumsy and no kind of athlete, and simply getting down into the boat was an event. After that I tried to follow the instructions and to stop my brain from calculating angles. It is only physics, I told myself, and it did not help much.

Nicola from Venice on Board was endlessly patient, and for an hour we moved along the canal while I thought about traffic jams and stared at the houses from the water. Palazzi from below, washing lines, a dog watching us from a stern. I finished with a new respect for anyone who rows without thinking about it.

Bacari, cicchetti, and a boat you can sit on

Elena was waiting at the first bacaro. The seating outside was the strangest I have seen: a large, stable boat moored at the edge, used as a bench. You buy your drink and snacks at the bar and carry them aboard. Local law is strict about this, and one rule is that drinks taken outside must be in plastic glasses, for safety.

If you eat seafood, Venice will feed you very well. I don't, and I still found plenty to sample — the cicchetti are not an afterthought.

Two things to drink while you are here. Prosecco is produced just outside the city, so the local bottles are worth your attention; Aperol Spritz is the other obvious order. One of the bars we visited took visible pride in refusing the spritz altogether and pouring only the wines of the region.

That lane was bars from end to end, and you could work your way along it for hours. Doing it by boat, mooring at each stop, would be the finest bar crawl imaginable.

Why this beat a guidebook

A guidebook can tell you what a place looks like. It cannot introduce you to the person who carves the rowlock. That is the argument for going with someone local, and it is why the evening stayed with me longer than any view.

If you are heading to the Veneto or to Sicily, Wanderjack is worth a look. They ask you to take a short quiz about the kind of traveller you are, collect your preferences, and then have an illustrator draw up a trip built around them. What I liked most is the principle underneath: travel that is responsible and that leaves something with the community. If more of us travelled that way, the difference would be considerable.

I was invited on this experience by Wanderjack, and everything written here is my own opinion. Venice on Board runs the local activities if you want to try the rowing yourself.

More from Italy on Europe Diaries

If you want to eat your way through the city, read my detailed post about food in Venice, markets included.

Other Italy pieces you might like:

• Exploring Florence on foot
• What to eat in Florence
• Milan in a day
• The best souvenirs to get from Italy

And for the food-obsessed, two more from the archive: Droolworthy vegetarian dishes from 24 countries in Europe, and Travelling to 4 cities in 3 countries for 110 Euros.

That is the view that greeted me at Santa Lucia, the one that made me gasp like a tourist and stop worrying about looking like one.