The Last Forcola Makers: A Conversation at the Workbench

An object shaped by a body, not a pattern

Walk past a forcola quickly and it can look decorative — a dark, sculptural piece of walnut with an odd, twisting silhouette, sometimes displayed on its own as an object rather than fitted to a boat. That reading misses the point entirely. Every curve in a forcola is functional. The piece typically offers several distinct rowing positions — for cruising, for a hard forward stroke, for backing water, for turning — and a gondolier moves the oar between them within a single stroke without lifting it from the fitting. No two forcole are quite alike, because no two rowers are quite alike: a maker measures a client's height, arm length and rowing style, along with the type of boat — gondola, sandolo, mascareta, topo — before cutting anything, and even the wood grain is chosen and oriented to suit how the piece will be stressed in use.

This is worth stating plainly because it is easy for visitors to encounter forcole only as souvenir-shop miniatures, disconnected from their working purpose. A functioning, full-size forcola is closer to a piece of bespoke orthopaedic equipment than to a decorative carving: it exists to fit one person's body doing one demanding physical task, repeated for hours, for years.

The workshop, in practice

The craft is properly called that of the remèr, the maker of oars and forcole, historically a distinct guild trade from the squerarioli who build the boats themselves, though the two crafts have always worked closely together. A remèr's workshop today is a small, wood-shaving-covered room, often tucked into a quiet calle rather than a canal-front tourist route, with rough walnut blocks waiting alongside half-finished forcole clamped to a bench. The work proceeds mostly by eye and hand tool — drawknife, rasp, spokeshave — rather than machine, because the final fitting depends on constant small adjustments checked against a rower's actual stance, something no fixed template can fully anticipate. A skilled maker can rough out the basic form relatively quickly but spends the bulk of the time on the fine curves where the oar actually seats, since a fraction of a centimetre in the wrong place changes how the stroke feels.

Workshops that continue this trade today typically combine bespoke commissions for working gondoliers and private boat owners with smaller decorative pieces sold to visitors — a commercial reality that keeps a genuinely difficult craft viable, even though a display forcola and a working one are different objects made with different priorities. Buyers who want an authentic, functional piece rather than a decorative curio generally need to commission directly and expect to wait; this is not a trade that operates on retail turnaround times.

Why so few makers remain

The number of Venetians earning a living primarily from forcola-making has fallen for reasons that echo other lagoon crafts: a long apprenticeship with modest early income, a shrinking base of working gondoliers and boat owners who need bespoke fittings as the resident boat-owning population declines, and competition from cheaper, non-custom reproductions aimed at tourists rather than rowers. Local craft bodies, including Confartigianato Venezia, have flagged traditional boatbuilding trades as being at genuine risk of disappearing within a generation if the current rate of attrition continues, since training a new maker to full competence typically takes years under an established craftsperson, and there are correspondingly few positions for a young person to learn in.

What keeps it alive

What has kept the trade from disappearing altogether is a combination of institutional and market forces: the city's rowing clubs and voga alla veneta associations, which train hundreds of Venetians, adults and children, in traditional standing rowing and therefore generate steady demand for correctly fitted equipment; a slow but real market of collectors and design enthusiasts internationally who value forcole as sculptural objects in their own right, which has, somewhat unexpectedly, helped subsidise makers' incomes; and the ongoing, if reduced, population of professional gondoliers who still need working fittings replaced or repaired.

None of this guarantees the craft's survival in its full traditional form. But it does mean that, for now, it remains possible to walk into a small workshop in Dorsoduro or San Polo and watch someone shape a piece of walnut into an object that will, eventually, decide exactly how another person's body moves a boat through water for years to come.