Memory of water: the women reshaping Venice – in pictures

This project 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, building traditional boats, and working in historically male-dominated crafts. We meet female gondoliers, a maestra d’ascia building gondolas, the city’s only female sandolista, and a teacher for lagoon navigation

Venice is a city of tradition and projection, a place feeding the imagination of millions of people arriving from elsewhere. The “impossible city”, suspended on water, often appears unchanged, fixed in time. Yet, like the water that carries it, the city is in constant, subtle transformation.

Beatrice, 28, has been working as a gondolier for one year, pictured during a shift operating the traghetto public-ferry gondola that crosses the Grand Canal