This antiwar song is the lament of a mother that lost her son to the war, as there are countless all across the Globe. This poor guy in particular was enslaved and put to the oars of a "galera", the biggest and most powerful warship of the Republic of Venice. In our regional dialect, as well as in Italian, "galera" is also an almost exact synonym of the word "prison", which says a lot about the living conditions suffered inside of those terrors of the seas.

The music is composed by Luisa Ronchini, one of the founding members of Canzoniere Popolare Veneto. The words are traditional... with a couple of deliberate changes that sounded better to my ears