«Eravamo contadine noi, ma tanto! Però davamo da mangiare a “loro”» Donne, lavoro e immagini di Venezia vista dalla Laguna

In the Venetian Lagoon, everyday life unfolds in close interdependence with a water-based ecology that shapes and permeates local ways of inhabiting the world. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Northern Lagoon with women born mostly in the late 1930s—who self-identify as peasant farmers—this article reflects on the perception of the environment and on the interrelationship between the islands and the city of Venice. Within the framework of memory, biographical narratives express the experience of hardship and a multifaceted, often oppressive, burden of women's labour in everyday life. Central to these narratives is the affective register of noialtri—“us people”—articulated as a collective sensibility grounded in a shared identity as workers and farmers, in experiences of physical and occupational mobility, and in the act of crossing the lagoon to sell fruit and vegetables at the Rialto market. The analysis explores counter-narratives of Venice, the emblematic role of Rialto as a site of economic and symbolic centrality, and the widely shared representation of the city as dominant over the lagoon, which is often constructed as a peripheral space. It also examines the social inequalities these women have experienced over time. Within this context of economic disparity, an autonomous lagoonal world emerges—one not subordinated to the domain of the sióri and paróni of Venice. Beyond the register of hardship, the women I met recount creative strategies for navigating daily life, practices of resistance to economic oppression, trajectories of social mobility, and personal forms of emancipation.