Are you willing to come with us and discover new profiles of Venice ? Profiles far away from the usual touristic rites?
If yes, be ready for a pleasant tour among shops and workshops that produce very precious manufacts, transmitting arts and knowledge generation after generation.
Many mosaics, glasses, fabrics and jewelry masterpieces are created by experts craftsmen and even more interesting pieces. These artifacts are used to decorate the most prestigious houses in the world and they make Italy and Venice very well known.
In our itineraries, we will also visit monuments and museums, especially those who document the history and the big tradition of Venetian crafts.
So, let’s start from Piazzale Roma, adjacent to the Santa Lucia train station and with the ferry of line 1, reach Riva di Biasio. Walking for a few minutes, equipped with a good map, we reach Campiello de la Comare, where there are the manufacture and the show room of AnticaTessitura Serica Luigi Bevilacqua, inSanta Croce, 1320.
A mythical place, synonymous of fines and prestigious fabrics, where a lot of ancient frames that belonged to the Scuola della Seta della Serenissima (Silk School of Ancient Venetian Republic) and thousands of holey boxes, that reproduce exclusives designs can be sold.
The silence of the laboratory is just broken for the hits of the pedals that set the weft of the warp. The work is very accurate: hundreds of reels of colored silk and thousands of wires must be organize in the right place and knotted in a different mode, depending on the function.
Daily, one loom permits to produce to the maximum 40 centimeters of cloth, imagine how much time to put together dozens and dozens of meters! With patience and expertise from others times, just a few experts artisans make damasks, velvets and brocades of dreams. The same ones that beautify the Yellow Room of the White House in Washington, “La Casa Rosada” in Buenos Aires or the Royal Palace of Qatar.
A curiosity: the fabrics of Bevilacqua still keeping a high quality that only a very expert eye could distinguish them from those produced in past centuries (visit the website for more informations).
With the eyes full of such beauty, we come back to the jetty of San Biasio and always with the line 1 of ferry, we navigate Canal Grande until the stop of San Stae, just in front of the same Campo: two steps and here is Palazzo Mocenigo, Mocenigo Palace, headquarter of the Museo di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume (Historical Museum of Fabrics and Fashion), another dream place, where you can admire the original Venetian furniture, antique textiles, sacred vestments and a big number of clothes of the 17th century. Exceptional is also the Library, with more than six hundred volumes about fashion, clothes and textures.
From Campo San Stae we continue our visit trough Fondamenta Rimpetto Mocenigo and then trough Calle del Forner, which leads us to the Fondamenta Ca’ Pesaro and the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (International Gallery of Modern Art), hosted in the homonymous and beautiful baroque palace, which has masterpieces of Klimt, Matisse and Chagall. On the last floor there is also the Museo d’Arte Orientale (Museum of Oriental Art), with a rich collection of Japanese and Asiatic Art.
Once the visits are over, we return to San Stae and reach Rialto by foot, following the tourist indications. Going trough Ruga dei Speziali, we stop in a historic store on the 381 street, the Drogheria Mascari, temple of traditional candies, candied fruit and others 200 types of species.
In Rialto, there is a full immersion in its lively and characteristic market of typical foods, like the first fruits of the land – lagoon, for example, Castraure, the violet artichoke of Sant’Erasmus or the Moeche, the crab collected during the molt period, when it is without a shell.
Exactly in front of the fruits counters, at the 74 of the Sottoportico degli Orafi, there is Attombri goldsmith Shop, an artisan who produce originally brooches and necklaces with glass of Murano and metal wires.
If you like this post, you can also read Stunnng Venice second part and
Stunning Venice third part
