Regata Storica's Grand Canal spectacle masks Venice's deeper shift

Venice's historic Regata Storica once again filled the Grand Canal with colour on Tuesday, as crowds gathered near the Rialto Bridge for the annual rowing celebration, according to Euronews. Historic boats paraded along the waterway in a spectacle that has drawn visitors to the lagoon city for centuries.

The festival is the most visible expression of Venice's rowing culture, a tradition that runs deeper than the tourist gondola rides that most visitors experience. The regatta brings together competitors from across the lagoon in a display of skill that has been passed down through generations of Venetian families.

Yet behind the pageantry, the world's coverage of Venice has increasingly focused on who is doing the rowing. A Guardian photo essay published this week, 'Memory of water', follows women who are not only preserving Venice's traditions but actively transforming them — learning to navigate motorboats, competing in regattas while advocating for equal recognition, and building traditional boats in historically male-dominated crafts. The project features female gondoliers and a maestro d'ascia, a master boat-builder, reshaping what has long been a closed world.

The timing is pointed. Venice's resident population has dwindled to under 50,000 in the historic centre, even as the city hosts ever larger crowds. The Regata Storica draws its participants from the communities that remain — the sestieri, the island parishes, the rowing clubs that keep the lagoon's maritime identity alive. If those communities are shrinking, the question of who carries the tradition forward becomes urgent.

The Guardian's photo essay frames these women as heirs to a living culture rather than curiosities. They are learning to navigate the same canals their male counterparts have navigated for centuries, competing in the same regattas, and claiming space in workshops where their presence would once have been unthinkable. Their work, the project suggests, is as much about the future of Venice as its past.

For a city that lives so visibly on its heritage, the Regata Storica remains the annual proof that the lagoon's traditions are not merely performed for tourists. But the festival also raises the question the international press keeps returning to: how does a city of museums keep itself alive? The women rowing in Tuesday's regatta, and the women building boats in the yards around the lagoon, offer one kind of answer.