A forcola is the open wooden rowlock a Venetian oar works against, and voga alla veneta is the rowing it makes possible: one person standing on the stern, pushing a single oar forward, steering and propelling at the same time. The forcola rises one or two feet above the gunwale and carries one or two notches, which take the oar either high or low (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26, 27).
What makes the arrangement work is leverage. The fulcrum is the blade itself, held in the water, so the stretch of oar between the water and the forcola acts as the load arm and the stretch the rower holds acts as the effort arm, in a ratio of roughly one to three to one to two (Camuffo, 2023, para. 28). That is the arithmetic behind moving an 11 m boat by hand (Camuffo, 2023, para. 116).
The oar is never fastened to the hull. It rests against the fork, works in a sculling manner, and doubles as a rudder, which is why one standing rower can take a gondola through blind corners and under low bridges without a second pair of hands (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26, 27).
What is a forcola, and how does it hold the oar?
A forcola is a shaped block of wood that rises one or two feet above the gunwale, and it is open and vertical rather than closed like a conventional rowlock. One or two notches are cut into it, and the oar can be set on the upper notch or the lower one depending on what the rower wants from the stroke (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26, 27).
Being fully open has a cost. The source on the mechanics is blunt about it: with nothing enclosing the shaft, keeping the oar in position is difficult, and it is hardest at the end of the stroke when the blade is loaded and the rower has to bring it back for the next push (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26). The skill a visitor watches from the fondamenta is mostly that recovery, repeated without a pause.
The payoff is range of movement. Because the oar is not captive, the rower can also work it against the other faces of the fork, pushing on the back side to brake or to drive the boat backwards, which is what lets a gondola stop short of a wall or reverse out of a side canal it cannot turn in (Camuffo, 2023, para. 27). The oar is never bolted or pinned to the hull. It is a loose lever resting in a wooden fork, and every manoeuvre the boat makes comes from where the rower puts it.
Why do gondoliers stand up to row?
Standing is what converts one pair of arms into enough force to move a long, heavy boat. The fulcrum of the stroke is the blade immersed in the water, so the short section running from the water up to the forcola carries the load while the long section in the rower's hands supplies the effort. The ratio between them runs from about one to three to one to two, and efficiency rises when the forcola sits low on a low gunwale, which is one reason the hull is built shallow (Camuffo, 2023, para. 28).
The second reason is sightlines. A standing rower moves the boat in the direction they are looking, and the raised position gives a clear view forward that a seated rower facing backwards cannot have. The source calls this particularly useful in narrow waterways (Camuffo, 2023, para. 14). In a city where canal junctions are blind, where traffic comes from two directions and where the clearance under a bridge changes with the tide, that view is worth more than the extra power of a sliding seat.
The two advantages reinforce each other. The rower stands at the stern, pushes the oar forward instead of pulling it back, and holds the roles of engine and helmsman in the same two hands (Camuffo, 2023, para. 27).
One rower or two: when a second oar goes in
A gondola is normally rowed by one person standing on the stern, and a second rower is added for a specific reason. Speed is the usual one: when a journey has to be fast, a second oar is worked from a forward position (Camuffo, 2023, para. 26, 27). Under the Republic, display was the other. Noble families kept gondolas with one or two pairs of rowers, both to go faster and to show what they could afford (Camuffo, 2023, para. 29).
The surviving two-oar service is the traghetto, the gondola ferry that crosses the Grand Canal at a handful of points. These boats are worked by two rowers placed diagonally, one on the right side and one on the left, which spreads the weight across the hull instead of loading one quarter of it. Because the imbalance is cancelled that way, a ferry gondola can still be built symmetrical, as gondolas generally were in the nineteenth century (Camuffo, 2023, para. 30).
A traghetto crossing is the cheapest way to stand in a working gondola, and watching two rowers hold a line across the current with oars on opposite sides shows the technique better than a ride through the quiet canals does.
Why one oar suits shallow and winding water
The technique is a response to the lagoon. Depth there is uneven and the bottom is soft, so Venetian boats came to be driven by oars rather than by poles pushed against the bottom, and they were built light with flat bottoms so as not to stick in the mud while crossing marshes and shallow channels (Camuffo, 2023, para. 10, 15, 22).
The numbers show how little water the boat needs. A modern gondola is about 11 m long and 140 to 160 cm wide, with a hull 65 cm deep of which roughly three fifths sits below the waterline, giving a draught of about 39 cm; at maximum load while stationary that can reach 52 cm (Camuffo, 2023, para. 116, 146). Rowing needs more than the draught alone, because the hull sways and the oar pivots below the surface: the working figure for safe rowing in shallow water is 60 to 70 cm (Camuffo, 2023, para. 147, 148). Anything less and the blade finds the bottom.
That same figure turns the old prints of gondolas on St Mark's Square into a flood measurement, since a boat under oar there means 60 to 70 cm of water over the paving (Camuffo, 2023, para. 148). Around 400 to 500 gondolas are estimated to be in service today (Camuffo, 2023, para. 96).
Who makes the oar and the forcola
Oars and forcole are a trade of their own. A finished gondola passes through more than eleven kinds of skilled work, and the remèri are the craftspeople who make the oars and the forcole, alongside the boatbuilders, the blacksmiths who forge the bow iron, the carvers, the gold leaf beaters and gilders, the upholsterers, and the hat makers, shoemakers and tailors who dress the gondolier (Rossi, 2023, para. 7, 9). An association in Venice has promoted these crafts together since 2002, and the sector is described as slowly losing ground to economic pressure and to new naval technology (Rossi, 2023, para. 1, 6).
The timber matters as much as the shaping. One boat draws on oak for the two load-bearing side boards, larch and fir for the planking, cherry for the thwarts, and elm, mahogany and walnut elsewhere, all of it required to have regular grain, few knots and no internal rot (Caniato, 2022, p. 200). The side boards alone are cut about 2.2 cm thick from an oak trunk 11.5 m long and roughly 40 cm across (Caniato, 2022, p. 207).
Each boat is also fitted to a person. The builder shapes the hull around the weight of the gondolier who ordered it and around the bow iron, which runs from 6 or 7 kg to 20 kg and more (Caniato, 2022, p. 208).
Where to see Venetian rowing and the yards behind it
The boatyard that builds and repairs these craft is called a squero. Historically Venice had two kinds: squèri da sotìl, which handled gondolas, sàndoli, topi and other small boats, and squèri da grosso at the edge of the city, which built the large wooden cargo craft before iron hulls and engines ended that work (Caniato, 2022, p. 201).
A traditional yard is recognisable from the water by two features: a slipway of beaten earth sloping into the canal, used to launch and haul out boats, and the tèza, a timber shed on brick piers with removable plank walls and sometimes living quarters above. Both can still be seen at the squero at San Trovaso in Dorsoduro, and at a yard on the rio de la Sensa in Cannaregio that has stood idle for over thirty years (Caniato, 2022, p. 201).
What goes on inside has changed. Tarred oakum and hot pitch have fallen out of use, partly because health rules bar molten pitch and partly because marine plywood has replaced boards seasoned and bent with heat. Resins and stainless steel screws have taken over from glue-free joints and galvanised nails, and the old Venetian units of measurement are going with them (Caniato, 2022, p. 202). To feel the leverage rather than read about it, the practical route is a rowing lesson in a flat-bottomed boat, which is covered on our rowing lesson page.
