The Last Working Boatyards of the Adriatic

The boats are called batane, flat bottomed and shallow drafted, designed for a coastline that turns from deep water to sand without much warning. They were the working vehicle of the northern Adriatic for four hundred years and they are now built almost exclusively for people who want one.

That shift, from necessity to preference, is the whole story of what remains of the trade. It is also the only reason any of it survives.

Four yards, eleven people

The largest of the four yards employs five. The smallest is one man who has been working alone since 2009 and expects to be the last person to do this job in his town. He was cheerful about it in a way that made the conversation harder rather than easier.

Apprenticeship is the binding constraint. A shipwright reaches competence in about six years, which is longer than most people will train for a job that pays what this one pays. Two of the four yards have an apprentice. Both apprentices are related to the owner.

What the photographs cannot show

The sound, mostly. A wooden boatyard is quieter than you expect and the quiet is not peaceful, it is concentration. Long silences broken by a single plane stroke, then more silence while someone checks a fit by eye.

And the smell of larch shavings, which everyone we spoke to mentioned unprompted, and which is apparently the thing former apprentices miss after they leave for jobs that pay properly.

All eleven of them expect the trade to outlast them, which is not the same as expecting it to survive. What they mean is that the boats already built will need maintaining for another fifty years, and somebody will have to do it. Whether that person will also know how to build a new one is a separate question, and none of them pretended to know the answer.