Just as in the days of La Serenissima, the financial establishment and commerce, the navy and society, the church and the arts were represented this past summer. The Aga Khan and Gianni Agnelli, the commander of Italy's Navy and the Principessa Begum Salimah Aga Khan, the chaplain who officiated in Latin, and an orchestra playing Handel's Water Music on a barge all participated. Azzurra's keel was hidden shrouded as is usual these days - but revealed in reflections on Azzurra's polished bow were ten small boats floating in the arsenal basin. Their story spans more than a thousand years in the life of the Venetian lagoon.

Shimmering in reflection were a sleek disdowna, an 1 8-oared mahogany shell rowed in parades and regattas; a 12-oared dodesona; a sandolo, the commonest of the lagoon boats; a mascareta, now the most popular of the rowing craft; the versatile caorlina, which can be rigged for sail; and a gondola. These characteristic lagoon boats with their colorful, robust crews are the ultimate evolution of rowing vessels in the unique ecosystem of the Venetian lagoon.

Other lagoons and other great cities exist by the sea, but none has so captured the imagination as Venice. To an interested yachtsman, the city is still magic. It piques a sailor's sense of sight, sound and smell at every turn. Almost everything and everyone moves on the water: the mailman, the fireman, the policeman, the ambulance, the hearse, the construction barge, the garbage collector, the wine deliveries, the flowers, the funds that move into banks and the bank robbers that speed away. Even before daybreak, one can hear the deep, peaceful chug-a-chug of seagoing tugs moving to moor huge passenger liners. There is a swish of waves against stone bulkheads, and the slap of wakes bouncing under the counters of empty water barges moored alongside. The scream of gulls and the higher-pitched calls of terns accompany the occasional roar of a water taxi en route to the airport, and for the late sleeper, the 7 A.M. bong of church bells can be heard in four different rhythms from four different bell towers like syncopated channel buoys ringing.

Venice has 28 miles of canals, with an average depth of 12 feet, along with Giudecca, the deep-water ship canal. They follow the original waterways among the 118 original islands connected by some 400 bridges. Under the bridges and through the waterways, boat traffic moves day and night. Main Street is the two-mile-long Grand Canal, between 120' and 220' wide, with a mean depth of 9'. Along its sides are 200 historic palazzi, with decorated facades designed to be seen from the water.

Natives will tell you the only way to view Venice is from a slow-moving oared craft, to see it as it was seen a few hundred years ago. To set the pace and the mood, the proper vehicle is the gondola, that quintessential Venetian boat. It carries passengers and their gear extremely well under the power of a single oar smoothly, quietly, with exquisite grace. There are actually six different types of gondolas on the waters of Venice: ferry, racing, pleasure, regatta and light gondolas. We speak here chiefly of the common, or traditional, gondola, in its present-day form, redesigned by Domenico Tramontin in the 1 880s and built now by his 64-year-old grandson, Nedis, and great-grandson Roberto in their two-man yard. There are no apprentices at Tramontin's. Union regulations specify apprentice wages that Nedis finds prohibitive.

In the picture below, gondolas of 400 years ago
race on the Grand Canal in a regatta for women.

A sailor who sees a gondola moored alongside the quay must think at first glance that something is wrong. It lists to starboard and seems twisted out of plumb. Actually, there is more of it to port both in width and depth than there is to starboard, and it heels to starboard until the gondolier takes his rowing position on the port quarter. The port side is more rounded to help counteract the thrust of the single oar to starboard. Gondoliers who are on good terms with the boatbuilder have their boats designed around such personal idiosyncrasies as body weight and rowing technique. Such designing is not done on a drawing board, but in the builder's eye and mind.

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