Why are gondolas black in Venice?

Are gondolas black because of mourning, or the plague?

It's the explanation you'll hear most often: that the boats went black as a sign of grief, for an epidemic or some other shared disaster. It sounds right, and it suits the city's melancholy image. But we haven't come across it in any of the sources we've read. The ones that do explain the colour talk about something far more worldly: money, and the urge to show off.

So why are gondolas black?

First, a bit of background. Tassini, whose book on the origins of Venice's street names came out in 1863 and was expanded in 1872, says gondolas caught on once people gave up getting about on horseback, as a way of avoiding the mud of streets that hadn't yet been paved with stone. The horses aren't an exaggeration, either: an early fourteenth-century law banned riding across the bridge of San Biagio, by the Arsenal, during Lent.

The earliest gondolas were humble, unadorned boats. But by the sixteenth century, with ten thousand or so plying the city, things got out of hand. They were decorated fore and aft with two curved irons trimmed with little spikes, and dressed in fabrics and brocades of quite excessive richness. Every family wanted the smartest gondola on the water, and the canals turned into a floating catwalk.

Enter the Magistrato alle Pompe, the body charged with reining in ostentation. It judged that things had gone too far and decreed that gondolas be covered in rascia, a plain woollen cloth, and that every single one carry it in the same colour: black, no exceptions. That, at least, is Tassini's account.

The Enciclopedia Italiana, in its 1933 article on the gondola, takes a wider view of the same process: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the luxury of these boats was such that the Senate's sumptuary laws had to step in more than once, until a rule was reached that was always followed afterwards, to use nothing but black, for the hull as well as for the fittings and hangings.

The moral of the story: rather than a colour of grief, black was a uniform imposed by decree. A very practical way of making sure nobody outshone the neighbours.

When was the black gondola law passed?

Time for some honesty: we don't know for certain. Neither Tassini nor the Enciclopedia Italiana gives a date, and the various dates doing the rounds online don't agree with one another, nor have we been able to check any of them against a document from the period. What both sources do agree on is the setting: the luxury of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and authorities determined to curb it, more than once.

What was rascia? And what's a felze?

Rascia, or rassa, was a coarse woollen cloth used to cover gondolas. Its name comes from Rascia, in what is now Serbia, where it came from. Near St Mark's there's a street that still remembers it, the Calle delle Rasse, because that's where it was sold. Tassini says that at the end of the eighteenth century, in the last years of the Republic, the master of the dyers' guild, Giovanni Barich, put out a printed notice inviting anyone who wanted to see samples of rasse for felzi to call in at that street. Rascia was still covering the felzi.

And the felze? It was the cabin set up in the middle of the gondola to shelter the passengers, covered in that black cloth. A traditional explanation has it that the word comes from felci, "ferns", because in summer the cabin was covered with those plants rather than with the cloth. A lovely etymology, and an unproven one: the Treccani dictionary gives the word's origin as uncertain. The same goes for "gondola" itself. Suggestions range from Latin to a word related to "shell" to various Greek terms, without any of them winning out.

Have gondolas always looked like this?

No. Gondolas are mentioned in Venice as early as the eleventh century, but they were something else entirely: bigger, slender boats with a ram at the bow and, it seems, twelve oars. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, paintings start to show light, narrow, flat-bottomed boats, with one or two oarsmen standing up and a small awning in the middle. The iron at the bow, the most recognisable bit of metalwork, didn't take on its characteristic shape until the eighteenth century. At the end of that century, Tassini tells us, the stern iron disappeared, the bow iron changed shape, and comfort replaced luxury in the additions.

The lines you know were fixed later. According to the Enciclopedia Italiana, in the mid-nineteenth century a group of builders from the Cadore, the Fassi brothers and Giuseppe Casal, settled the gondola's lines, shape and dimensions. The same work notes two curiosities. First, the gondola is asymmetrical, built with its axis skewed to help it along and to suit the gondolier's movements. Second, its glossy black had a secret recipe: a varnish covering the whole hull, made mainly of linseed oil and lampblack, the pigment you get from soot.

Gondolas came out of the squeri, the boatyards. Their builders, the squerarioli, formed a guild in 1610 and had their devotional confraternity in the church of San Trovaso, the very church that collapsed without warning one night in September 1583. A few steps from it, on the same canal, is one of those boatyards: the squero of San Trovaso, which you look at from the opposite bank.

Fact or legend?

• Fact, according to Tassini (1872): in the sixteenth century there were about ten thousand gondolas, and the Magistrato alle Pompe had them covered in a coarse, uniformly black cloth to curb luxury.
• Fact, according to the Enciclopedia Italiana (1933): the Senate's sumptuary laws ended up imposing black for the hull, the fittings and the hangings.
• No reliable date: the year of the law. Neither source gives one.
• No documentary evidence: mourning or the plague as the origin of the black.
• Unproven: that the felze was named after ferns, and where the word "gondola" comes from.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "From the Accademia to the Salute along the Zattere", which crosses Dorsoduro between the Accademia bridge, the Zattere waterfront and the Salute. You hear it facing the squero of San Trovaso, at the stop "Black gondolas, by law". Just before it, "The boatbuilders' church that sank overnight" tells what happened to the boatbuilders' church.

The Calle delle Rasse turns up at the stop "The doge who changed his route", on the route "The Doge's Palace from Outside: Conspiracies, Prisons and Casanova". And a gondola was the first leg of the most famous escape in Venetian history, Casanova's, which we tell in Why is it called the Bridge of Sighs?. For the practical side of your trip, see our Venice guide.

Further reading

• Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità veneziane, ovvero Origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia, 2nd edn (Venice: Grimaldo, 1872), entries "Felzi", "Rasse", "S. Biagio" and "Squero" (in Italian). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_pXcnz0In69IC
• Ugo Nebbia, "Gondola", Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani), 1933 (in Italian). https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/gondola_(Enciclopedia-Italiana)/
• Treccani, Vocabolario, "felze" (in Italian). https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/felze/
• Treccani, Vocabolario, "rascia" (in Italian). https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/rascia/