Traghetti in Venice

Introduction

Research Question: "Who owns and who operates the Venitian traghetti?"

Objectives:

• Analyze who the owners of the ferries are?
  • Are there prevalent families owning most of the businesses? If so who are they and what are their social and political position in the city
  • Is the ownership stable throughout the years? (Comparing with Sommarioni data?) (Comparing with present data?)
  • Are the owners of Traghetti building centers (squero) the same as owners of traghetti businesses?
  • What other businesses Traghetti owners have and are they in some way related to the Traghetti?

• Analyze who exploits the ferries?
  • Is it a family specific business or open to anyone willing to do such work?
  • Do the families exploiting the traghetti stay the same? (Compare with present data / Sommarioni?)

• Spatial analysis
  • Are there specific families owning or exploiting in specific parts of the city? If so, why?
  • Why are traghetti where they are ? (Usually on the main canal, but sometimes not)
  • Which zones are most profitable for traghetti owners (based on rental prices?)

Project Timeline & Milestones

Week	Task	Status
14.10 - 20.10	Define the research question
Autumn Vacation	---------------------
28.10 - 03.11	find and read litterature
04.11 - 10.11	continue reading litterature + extracting and classifing owner data
11.11 - 17.11	Midterm Presentation + Visualisation tool for historical maps
18.11 - 24.11	catastici and sommarioni alignment + entity owned distribution + heatmap rental prices analysis
25.11 - 01.12	analysis from the catastici and sommarioni aligment (ownership change, ...) + dig into specific family / entities (Ospedale / Filosi) + Spatial analysis of traghetti (historical maps) + start writing the wiki (Methodology)
02.12 - 08.12	Compare results of families in time + Analyse results of squero and traghetti owner families + Analyse tenets of traghetti (somewhat interesting?) + Continue to write the wiki (finish introduction)
09.12 - 15.12	Finish writing wiki + Compare the results to present day data (should it be available)
16.12 - 22.12	Formating and last minute changes or analysis

Methodology

1. Data Extraction

The function field in the 1740_Catastici dataset was used to filter out the ferry data. We focused on different kinds of ferries in the Venice area, specifically the Italian words traghetto and gondola.

Keyword in function	Count	Denotes
traghetto	168
gondola	???

2. Family Data Classification

The owner data are extracted

References

Zanelli, G. (2011). Gondole e traghetti. In: Matematica e cultura 2011. Matematica e cultura. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1854-9_5 Huffman, K. L. (2024). A View of Venice : Portrait of a Renaissance City. (K. L. Huffman, Ed.; 1st ed.). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478023807