Contracting in the City of Canals

What’s life like as a contractor in a city where canals take the place of roads? This is one of the questions I’ll be attempting to answer during my 8 day visit to Venice, Italy. I’m a couple of days into my time here, but already I know that the Venetian contracting scene is way more economically depressed than the Canadian one. Way more depressed than even the American scene.

Venice has 60,000 full-time residents and a massive tourist population, but according to the locals I’ve talked to, more than half of the contracting firms in Venice have gone under during the last few years. That’s one reason contractors are not easy to spot here.

Another reason I’m in Venice is to discover everything I can about the differences between Italian ideas of craftsmanship and Canadian ones. I’ll be giving you a sense of that over my next few blogs, based on what I’ll learn visiting architectural millwork shops, touring one of the newest carbide saw blade manufacturing plants in the world (a couple of hours outside of Venice), and visiting a traditional shop that builds wooden gondolas.

So far, my best description of Venice is simple: Elegant decay. Venice is a masonry city, built almost entirely of light red or sandy-coloured bricks. Many of these bricks are quite substantially washed away by centuries of weathering, and though no one seems to be doing anything about it, I’m glad. This place is beautiful in the way that only natural deterioration of authentic materials can accomplish.

Venice is built on more than 100 marshy islands where the Po River empties into the Adriatic Sea. So why would anyone built a city in such an unlikely place? Venice was officially founded in the year 421, after a community of refugees fled there from nearby Italian cities being attacked by barbarians as the Roman empire crumbled. More interesting to me is exactly how you build a masonry city on such a soft and squishy foundation. That’s what I’ll fill you in next, along with what I learned while visiting a cabinet shop that’s currently building a bedroom set for the daughter of the King of Saudi Arabia.