Capitolo 2 The smaller shipbuilding activity in Venice

3 - The decline
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A vessel produced in the arsenal	The decision of the Senate, in the year 1660, to begin in the arsenal the production of sailing vessels of oceanic kind and great loading capacity saturates in brief the already restricted market of the naval orders and caused in the private activity of building ships that crisis that till that moment had been avoided thanks to the ductility of the squeraroli in converting their own production following the needs of the market. This crisis aniway is to be linked to the general one of trades and Venetian navy, that do not obtain any relief nor even from the reconquest of Morea at the end of the seventeenth century. The main causes of this state of things are to be looked for in the high customs- costs and insurance-ones that meet the Venetian shipowners and from the huge difficulties for the private builders in the supplying of wood. When all the great European marines were sailing, also the Venetian Senate decided to build square sailing ships. It had already had to buy war vessels in England and Holland ( which was strange for the tradition of the Venetian Republic!), since the introduction of the square sailing had revolutionized the war tactics in the sea. On the model of an English ship, in 1667 it came from the Arsenalthe "Giove Fulminante", long 38 metres (the keel) and 44,5 all out, wide 10,9 metres ( floor).
	The decadence of the republic drags also the class of the builders "da squero" to a slow, but irreversible decline; the private activity of building ships already from some time is addressed, also for the want of wood, to ships of a limited tonnage is obliged to the building of crafts of local or lagoon-kind. The crisis of the traffics and the maritime freights contracts, in fact, further, the orders of merchandise ships that was the flower at the buttonhole of the production of the squeri. To the squeraroli so remain those constructions suitable to the small local shore coasting and the fishing. In particular from the squero they go out in a quantity always increasing the gondole. The fact that the gondola was exclusive product of squeri of Venice and that also in other areas of the lagoon boats were produced, made create a misunderstanding about the gondola as their only production, which is not true.
A Venetian "squero" in the Nineteenth century	The fall of the republic in 1797 causes in the activity of building ships a crisis from which, in practice, it will never rise: ceasing the overseas trades we have a drastic contraction of the naval shipyards and a sensible reduction of the employed. The following foreign dominations condition sensibly also the professional figure of the Venetian squerarolo , who converts his productionin the lagoon-ships. Nowadays the rival of the squerarolo is no more the specialized employee of the arsenal, but the new technologies and the new materials. And it is no more the want of the building wood to favour the crisis of the sector, but the want of "masters".