Project Description

THE GRAND CANAL IS FILLING OF COLORS

Historical Regatta

The Historical Regatta is one of the most important events in the Venetian calendar, which recalls the ancient competitions between the regatters, joining rowing, the Venetian sport par excellence, the history and the glories of the Serenissima.

Typical manifestation of a city that lives on water, the first historical evidence dates back to the mid-thirteenth century.

In ancient times the regattas were divided into challenges between boatmen or gondoliers and big regattas (the latter were motivated by exceptional religious or secular city celebrations). Only since 1899, on the occasion of the III International Biennial of Art and on the proposal of the Mayor of Venice, Count Filippo Grimani, the regatta assumed the name of “historical”.

The regatta consists of various races on particular types of boats (in ancient times it was also disputed on galleys, peatoni, burchi, as well as on agile boats with two or more oars), and the most followed and exciting is certainly the regatta of gondolini. The basin of San Marco and the Grand Canal teem with boats of all kinds, from which citizens attend the competition with partisan animosity.

To open the event the historical procession that recalls the reception reserved in 1489 to Caterina Cornaro, wife of the King of Cyprus, who renounced the throne in favor of Venice.

It is a parade of dozens of sixteenth-century boats, multicolored and with gondoliers in costume, with the Bucintoro that carries the Doge, the Dogaressa, Caterina Cornaro and all the highest offices of the Venetian Magistrature, in a faithful reconstruction of the glorious past of one of the most powerful and influential Maritime Republics in the Mediterranean.