The trabacolo (trabaccolo) Francesca Valeria with its eyes torn out, before its destruction.

Another important source of information is obviously the boat or the wreck. Fortunately we can still count on some tens of original vessels, while others - the largest and most beautiful like the trabacoli and the burci that were reduced to wrecks - have been definitively destroyed without leaving a single fragment. All that remains of these vessels are memories, the photographs we have taken and a few notes we were lucky enough to find.

Survey of a trabacolo (trabaccolo)

These are irreparable losses because a wreck can give us an enormous amount of information, as long as it is interrogated with humility, without preconceived ideas, with the maximum acumen, continually moving from a general perspective to the smallest detail. The result is therefore directly proportional to the ability to observe every clue and to ask questions: a mark where an object has been worn, the position of a scupper, the marks left by a tool can reveal a use, a technique or a sequence used in construction. In short, the wreck provides us with answers; the challenge is to ask the right questions.

The greatest difficulties in surveying a wreck are obviously physical and logistical: boats and wrecks are sometimes very large, difficult to draw and photograph, nearly always semi-submerged on the side of sandbanks, leaning over and deformed by neglect, and surounded by 'natives' who are not easily convinced that our reasons for examing a boat are disinterested.

Only in the luckiest cases of boats that are still in use, whose owners understand our motivations, can work be carried out in the best conditions: in a boatyard or boathouse, where the external parts of the boat - including the bottom of the hull - can be examined and surveyed. The removable parts of the boat should not be forgotten: the rudder, forcole, oars, sails, masts; even the rigging, the nails. Fragments of boats and models are also surveyed.

This is to explain that a reasonably accurate survey requires several days' work, the cooperation of several people who are good at working with their hamds, precision verging on pedantry, as well as the ability to make technical drawings, freehand sketches and 2D and 3D digital modelling, etc. It is not surprising, therefore, that many drawings we have examined have proved to be unreliable, as distant from the original as the draughtsman from the boat.

Thanks to the those who have helped us, we have been able to conclude a number of these surveys, or at least a photographic report. However, there are still many types of boat that need to be surveyed before they disappear completely.

Please contact Gilberto Penzo gilbertopenzo@libero.it if you would like to contribute to this research.

Survey of a beam of a bragosso (bragozzo).

The destruction of a trabacolo.

Wreck of a bragosseto

Wreck of a burcio  (burchio)

Penzo examining a wreck

Drawing of a wreck of a bragosso (bragozzo)