Memory of water: Venice's women reshape lagoon traditions

The Guardian has published a photographic project titled 'Memory of water', documenting the women who are not only preserving Venice's traditions but actively transforming them. The essay follows female gondoliers, a master boat builder, and women competing in regattas while advocating for equal recognition in the lagoon's historically male-dominated crafts, according to the newspaper.

The project, which appeared in the Guardian's world section on Sunday, captures women learning to navigate motorboats, building traditional wooden boats, and working in crafts that have long been closed to them. It presents the lagoon not as a static museum piece but as a living workshop where gender roles are being quietly rewritten.

For a city whose global image is fixed on gondoliers in striped shirts and centuries-old regattas, the photographs offer a counter-portrait: Venice as a place of adaptation, where the skills that sustain its watery infrastructure are passing into new hands.

The Guardian's photo essay arrives as Venice continues to navigate the twin pressures of mass tourism and a shrinking resident population. The city's crafts — from gondola building to the handling of motorboats in its congested canals — have traditionally been male preserves, and the women featured in the project are described as working both to preserve techniques and to win recognition within them.

The project's title, 'Memory of water', gestures at something deeper than a record of changing employment patterns. In Venice, memory is stored in the lagoon itself — in its foundations, its boatyards, its rituals — and the women documented are framed as custodians of that memory even as they alter its transmission. The Guardian's presentation emphasises transformation over preservation, showing traditions that survive by being remade.

The timing is significant. Venice's cultural identity has become a matter of international debate, with UNESCO and foreign critics repeatedly warning that over-tourism threatens the very heritage the city sells. A photo essay that turns attention to the people who actually build and pilot the city's boats offers a different register: less about the visitors who consume Venice than the residents who maintain it.

The project also touches on advocacy, with the women pictured competing in regattas while pushing for equal recognition in a sport and craft culture that has been slow to admit them. The Guardian's framing suggests the lagoon is becoming a site of quiet social change, one regatta and one boatyard at a time.