Olivetti Showroom (Negozio Olivetti)

In 1956 Carlo Scarpa won the Olivetti prize for architecture. The following year Adriano Olivetti commissioned him to design a shop on Piazza San Marco, meant to serve as a "calling card" for his industry; the work is dated 1957-1958. It was not a place for selling but a showroom, meant to express Olivetti's outlook: innovation and function joined to culture and aesthetics. The company already had a branch in Venice: a shop opened as early as 1938 in the Bacino Orseolo, a few steps from the square, to a design by Marcello Nizzoli.

The premises chosen are part of the Procuratie Vecchie and belong to Assicurazioni Generali. Scarpa left a description of them: a front part and, behind a wall, another room, with a central pillar and two windows. He explained that he put the staircase where he gained thickness.

The shop was later left abandoned for years. After a restoration paid for by Generali, the FAI reopened it to the public on 20 April 2011 and has managed it ever since. In January 2024 the side door was taken down for the first time since it was built, then restored in the workshop of the Officina Fabbrile Zanon, the Venetian smiths who had made it originally; it was back in place in March.

The starting point, under the arcades of the Procuratie Vecchie, was a narrow, dark room; Scarpa opened it to the square and filled it with light. Everything turns on the Aurisina-stone staircase in the middle of the room: its steps, offset from one another, seem to float and give it both lightness and gravity. Near the entrance, Alberto Viani's sculpture Nudo al Sole rises above a black marble basin.

The floor, a mosaic of marble and coloured Murano glass, keeps its sparkle even when the acqua alta, Venice's high tide, covers it. The rosewood and frosted-glass walls hold lighting that at night spreads a warm glow out onto the square. The galleries are of African teak; these carefully chosen materials and the daylight heighten the colours and the transparencies.

On the Sottoportego del Cavalletto side, the façade is clad in bush-hammered Istrian stone, balanced by large glazed openings at the corner and on the main entrance front, facing the square. Set in this cladding, the secondary door is a monolith of Istrian stone weighing over 250 kg: a slab two metres high and five centimetres thick, fixed to a brass frame that cannot be seen from outside, so that the surface of the façade stays unbroken. The Olivetti logo, drawn in 1954 by Marcello Nizzoli, is carved into it at the top right and picked out in gold leaf. The door opens on a pivot, by a rotating and sliding mechanism made entirely of brass to a special design.

Run by the FAI, the showroom displays a selection of historic machines from the 1950s and 1960s. Students, scholars and enthusiasts visit it, and it belongs to the Circuito Scarpiano. A framework agreement signed in March 2019 brings together Ca' Foscari University, Iuav, the Querini Stampalia Foundation and the FAI to promote Scarpa's works on their premises.

The showroom is open Tuesday to Sunday; tickets are sold online or at the ticket desk on the ground floor, and guided tours are offered. Groups of more than ten people, up to twenty-five, send their request to the FAI.

The entrance is from Piazza San Marco. The site is only partly accessible to people with reduced mobility: two steps lead up to the ground floor, where the ticket desk is, and the upper floor can be reached only by the stone staircase. There are no toilets for visitors.