The Vaporetti, public transport boats, are surely one of the soundest symbols of modern Venice, expression of a community which has not just gazed at the splendour of its ancient history, but has also worked, starting from the end of the nineteenth century, in order to take up the glove of the progress of the time. The boats of the public transport are so much present and rooted in the lagoon landscape, to represent, for visitors, a huge part of the special image which is proper of the city and, for the residents, an almost mimetic element, so ordinary in the routine of everyday’s life to be absorbed by it. From this element comes the idea to run through the history of the vaporetto, talking about the planning, technological and organizational knowledge that produced with the time a concentration of a specific learning, that cannot be found in none of other Italian cities and in really few other places in the world.

In the field of public transport, Venice came earlier than all other Italian cities, introducing as first the mechanical propulsion system for the connection with the estuary (1872) and then, with the vaporetto Regina Margherita, the service in theCanal Grande (1881). All this happened a lot of time before the electric tram came, which can be considered as the correspondent means of transport for passengers in the “cities of land”. In Milan, the first electric tram connects Piazza Duomo to Corso Sempione in 1893, in Rome the first tram comes in 1895, in Turin in 1898. Also the shift to a direct management by the City Council takes place in Venice before than elsewhere, precisely in 1904, while in Turin we have to wait the year 1907, in Rome 1909, Milan 1917, in Naples 1918, in Bologna ’24 and in Florence ’34. Since more than a century Venice has been developping boats that make the city more accessible, looking for a means of transport that were able to adapt itself to the city’s predominant way of getting around, that is to say going by foot. The vaporetto is a kind of mobile bridge on which the passenger can ideally keep up his walking route, moving in the water between two landing-stages. The vaporetti are like mobile architectures, that represent the ideal extension of the banks; even with all the morphological differences, they recall the archetypal concept of people mover. The different kinds of drafts originate from the several different needs that revealed with time, and from the urbanistic changes of the city: we had thus steamboats and motor-ships to connect the lagoon settlements, ferryboats and motor-boats for the main channels and, with the spreading of cars, there came the landing crafts.

There is a tradition of attention for details and materials, as in the motor-ships Rialto and Lido of ’32, with cabins in natural walnut and maple polished wood, polished teakwood seats, linen and silken curtains; or just think about the little motorboats planned to pass through the Rio Nuovo, digged in ’33, which had brass railings and bronze bollards.

This technological innovation has always had to face the city’s social aspects and spread interests, as in the case of the machines for the tickets’distribution, introduced in ’29, but used since the beginning to protect the workplace of ticket clerks. Unique in the world, the lagoon’s public transport constitutes a set pattern. Every “city offer”, from cultural events, to great happenings, visits, museums and monuments, is to be linked to the service given by the vaporetti. The activities, anyway, must always be thought together with the deep roots of the Venetian community, making the most of a common culture and an historical heritage that we all use, maybe without paying much attention, almost without realizing it.