Florentine Renaioli

The Arno river has always been a faithful friend to the Florentines, allowing the proliferation of numerous activities along its banks, exploiting every resource it made available. In particular, a city with an intense building activity like Florence, needed a great quantity of building material, and it is precisely to this necessity that the Renaioli provided for. In the 19th century, they were those who digged sand from the bottom of the river, sailing on small boats.
The boats of the renaioli had to be kept always in good condition, because they could also be used to transport the citizens in exceptional cases. Every evening they were pulled ashore and kept safe at the docks to avoid their clandestine use during the night.
The sand collected by the renaioli was divided by degree of thinness and piled up and left to dry on the shore and then transported to construction sites with the "barroccio", a special cart, to be used to build Florentine houses and palazzi.

When the Arno was dry, the activity could be carried out even without a boat, but whether practiced from the shore or on the water, that of the sand digger remained a very hard and tiring work. The renaioli were often the subject of chatter among tourists visiting the city, scandalized by the sight of these men who worked on the river all sweaty and bare-chested.
So much effort also required a great deal for energy, and consuming a large meal was absolutely necessary. That's where the wives of the renaioli came into play: at lunchtime they began to cook large quantities of pasta and "florentine trippa" on the riverbanks and once the meal was ready they shouted loudly to call in their husbands: "Bucaioli, c'è le paste!" (roughly translated as "Hole diggers, pasta is ready!"), an expression now entered in the Florentine slang. The renaioli were in fact commonly called "bucaioli" because of the numerous holes they left at the bottom of the Arno with their continuous digging.

The activity of the renaioli, often represented in the paintings of Macchiaioli artists, continued until the World War II, when it was replaced by modern methods of sand extraction.

However, since 1995, the Association "I Renaioli" was established to preserve the historic boats, that today is possible to take on a tour of the Arno river and see Florence from a new perspective.
The tour includes the privileged passage under Ponte Vecchio, certainly a unique experience one should try once in a lifetime!