The place caught my eye on a blisteringly hot afternoon when I almost by accident found myself in the tourist Bermuda Triangle between the Basilica and the Rialto. I don't know what precisely I thought I was doing, but when saw all those typewriters in the window I stopped in my tracks. I've been obsessed with the machines since I bought my first one at a second-hand electronics and gadget shop in Jersey City in 1999. My somewhat decrepit, rebuilt Royal electric was a great start, so fun to draft out things with its noisy ease. Through the years I picked up more typewriters, often as gifts from people who knew my weird fascination. My current favorite is an Olympia SM9 from the early or mid-1960s, a great triumph of West German industrial craftsmanship that is as reliable as it is heavy (it is lovingly described by some as only "semi-portable"). I love when it rests next to my MacBook on the desk, like the twin poles of function and design, content and form.
But I've always longed for, maybe lusted for, an Olivetti, especially a Lettera, preferably with some cool candy-colored casing. Those guys are sleek and portable, and their very "thwack" seems both more sharp while mysteriously effortless and nonchalant — sort of like the way Italian dudes can pull off wearing a scarf and jeans.
So on that summer day I had to know why there were all those vintage machines lined up in the window. I walked inside, which was mercifully air conditioned, into what looked like a showroom, or possibly a museum. Turns out it was both. I asked the lovely young lady reading a very serious, thick book behind a desk what this place was, and she explained in her heavily inflected English that it was basically both: a museum about a shop.
Back in 1957, the Olivetti company commissioned a Venetian architect named Carlo Scarpa to design what they hoped would be a "business card" for the company. The place was ostensibly supposed to sell typewriters, but also the brand. Already Venice was awash in tourists, and the company was ready to spend to make sure that some of those international jet-setters would get an eyeful of Italian typographical excellence.
And boy did they! The space was small and narrow and dark, but Scarpa completely reshaped it and loaded it with brilliant design elements. The most important feature is a central staircase right in the middle of the two-story space, with stone slabs that form a sort of zig-zag pattern that looks a bit like the Black Flag logo, and similarly gave me a sense of movement, of pistons pumping or the arms of a typewriter rhythmically fwapping the paper. The slabs are Aurisina marble, from near Trieste, which honored local building traditions, and the shelves are of rosewood with teak flooring, which almost feels Asian in its clarity. Simple steel rods hold the wood up, very modest and very functional. The light is diffuse and insistent, and the sound of clacking keys is played on the soundsystem, which is a touch of overkill if you ask me. The various typewriters — and calculators, cash registers, etc. — are displayed with the dignity they deserve. But it's a shame you can't touch anything. It's also a shame the whole thing takes minutes to get through, which makes the admission fee feel a bit steep (also, the reason I don't have any photos from the inside is that I refused to pay extra for the photo ticket).
The company closed the shop in 1997, but in recent years a government agency called the Fondo Ambiente Italiano got involved to restore it to what it was like in its glory days. The FAI lists as its mission to "serve as the mouthpiece for the interests and expectations of the public, actively supervising and intervening on their behalf across the country to defend Italy's landscape and cultural heritage."
Venice is the sort of place that demands the kind of melancholy and nostalgia that made me imagine whether in a hundred years or so we'll have in America a similar group that will painstakingly recreate the first Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment