Ferro
At the prow of the gondola, the characteristic and traditional "Ferro" the "Iron". This element in shape of a large and heavy comb with six teeth in the front and one in the back, act as a counterbalance to the gondolier's weight. Some say, according to the tradition, that the six front "teeth" represent the six "Sestieri" of Venice, while the back tooth symbolise the Giudecca.
posted by Pierre at 4:07 AM
7 Comments:
Love the closeup! Aere you back in Venice then?
Yes.. and moreover the upper part represents the Doge's cap and the little three "lacework" (called "leaves") among the six teeth represent the three islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello
Hi Alexa, right I'm back. Back to my incessant weekly journeys back and forth to Venezia... But with NY in my mind anyvay. One doesn't leave New York so easily, your mind stays there for at least a week after you're back. And at the end of June, I'm heading for America again for almost two month with my sons.Hurrah :-))
But I promise that, with a little help of my venetian friends, I'll manage to keep on posting daily or almost daily.
Thanks Francesco for this complement of explanation. Perfectely true and well explained.
@ francesco, are you quite sure about the meaning of the lacework in the ferro?
during the open days in the arsenale, some weeks ago, i learnt from a guide over there that each piece of lace work represents one of the bridges over the canal grande. thus, the older a gondola is, the less bridges there are. since then i've seen one gondola swith four bridges and i seem to remember that the gondola in the museum ca rezzonico has only one.
@Jonneke: really the association about the laceworks is twofold: somebody says the three (I've always seen three) laceworks symbolize the three islands, somebody else says that they are the three bridges: Rialto, Accademia, Scalzi (in front of the railway station). From nearly an year the bridges are four with the new one, so maybe in some new gondolas it's been added one lacework, but absolutely the first version (which of the islands) is the more historically correct, or at least the more used on history texts about my city.
@ franceso, this morning i've been to the bibioteca marciana, hoping to find the truth about this. there they have lots of stories about ferro (all different ones of course), but i haven't seen a story about the lacework.
however, i have seen a picture of a ferro, made in 1754, and in this ferro were three pieces of lacework.
thus the story of the bridges cann't be true: in that year the ponte dell'accademia as well as the ponte degli scalzi still had to be build.
nevertheless, it stays intriguing:
why is lido not included? venexiani love to go to lido, don't they?
> thus, the older a gondola is, the less bridges there are. <
The second and third bridges, Accademia and Scalzi were originally built in cast iron by the austrian occupation troops circa 1855, according to the designs of a british engineer named A. E. Neville.
There are no gondolas this old, they are usually discarded after just 20 years of use. The oldest gondola preserved is in a US museum, gift of the poet Robert Browning, built circa 1846 and that boat left Venice before 1900.
Old gondolas are traditionally used to fire up the glass-making furnaces in Murano, that is probably a noble finish.
All in all, the "islands explanation" is probably more correct for tose little keys in the ferro.
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