The Memory of Water

The Guardian's photo essay on the women reshaping Venice arrives at a moment when the city's image abroad is fixed between two clichés: the sinking museum and the carnival of tourists. The project offers a third frame, one that shows women learning to navigate motorboats, competing in regattas, and building traditional boats in workshops long closed to them. This is not heritage as preservation but heritage as reinvention.

The world's coverage of Venice tends to treat the city as a passive object, a stage for floods and selfie sticks. What these photographs remind us is that Venice is also a place of work, and that the work is changing hands. The female gondoliers and maestras d'ascia are not curiosities; they are evidence that a craft culture can adapt without losing its memory. The water remembers, the report suggests, and so do the women who move upon it.

We would extend the observation beyond the lagoon. Italy's other heritage cities face the same tension between conservation and living culture, and the international press rarely notices the people who keep those places alive. Florence, Rome, Naples: each has its own version of this story, though the cameras are seldom pointed there. The Guardian's lens is welcome, but it is one frame among many.

There is also a political dimension the foreign coverage touches only lightly. The EU's proposed rules on short-term rentals, reported this week, aim to ease the housing pressure that tourism has intensified. If Venice is to remain a place where boat-builders can afford to live, the regulation of tourist flows is not an economic sidebar but a condition of cultural survival. The women in these photographs are not merely tradition-bearers; they are test cases for whether a living city can outlast its own image.