Recovering traditional boats in Padua: Golena S. Prosdocimo

In Golena S. Prosdocimo the past is all around you. This was the salt port, known as the Padua’s old river port (Portello Vecchio) . The boats carried salt from the Venice lagoon along the water course of the channel Roncajette.

Between the beginning and the middle of the sixteenth century, after the siege of Padua by the League of Cambrai (1509), the Venetian Republic built massive walls around the city of Padua which, almost entirely unbroken, survive to this day, (apart from sections demolished in the 1960s to build the new hospital ). The walls are about 11 km long, with 19 wide and low towers called “bastions” and five doors which remain of the seven original ones.

In Golena S. Prosdocimo the Venetians built a defense system consisting of a castle (Castelnuovo) connected to two bastions (bastion Portello Vecchio and bastion Venier). However the castle was not completed and it was only the impressive walled curtain that remained intact as can be seen even today, five centuries later.

A new Port (Portello Nuovo) was opened later (1534), for travellers and the old port, gradually lost its importance.

The bastion Portello Vecchio is now home to the headquarters of Amissi del Piovego, where the dock for Padovanella, the boat that traces the old Padua waterways, can be found.

The no-profit organization Amissi del Piovego was founded in 1980, its aims include protection of the environment, historical and cultural promotion and the enhancement of the Padua river system and Venetian rowing.
Here we have recently improvised our squero where we restore old traditional boats of the Venetian lagoon.

Detail of the map "Padua surrounded by old walls" - Vincenzo Dotto, 1623

Map of Padova by Frederick de Wit (1693), detail with the Castelnuovo (no. 16), the two bastions Portello vecchio on the right and Venier left and boats along the Piovego canal near the Portello Nuovo