Venice's Regatta and the Women Rewriting Its Waters

The photographs in the Guardian's 'Memory of water' series show a Venice that the postcards omit: women learning to navigate motorboats, competing in regattas, building boats in yards where their presence was once unthinkable. This is not a rejection of the city's heritage but an expansion of it, a claim that the lagoon's future belongs to those who have always lived beside it, not merely to those who visit it.

The Regata Storica, which filled the Grand Canal with colour this week, is a pageant of continuity, a spectacle of oars and silk that reassures the world Venice remains itself. Yet continuity is never static. The women rowing in the parade are not ornaments; they are evidence that a living tradition must be able to change, or it becomes a museum piece, preserved but no longer practiced.

What the international lens often misses is that Venice's struggle is not only against rising waters but against a rising tide of sameness, the pressure to perform its history for consumption. The women in these photographs resist that pressure by doing the work of the city, the skilled, physical, unglamorous labour that keeps a place inhabited rather than merely visited.

We would do well to read these images as a lesson in how heritage survives. It is not kept alive by freezing it in amber but by allowing new hands to take up the old tools. The women of the lagoon understand this; the rest of us, watching from the shore, might learn to see tradition as a conversation rather than a monument.