Lucio Orsoni
While in Venice, I had the pleasure of visiting the Orsoni mosaic foundry and staying at Domus Orsoni, the adjacent bed and breakfast that was once home to a bustling Orsoni clan in the city’s Canneregio district. Lucio, the great-grandson of Orsoni’s founder Angelo, took me on a tour of the compound one morning. Dressed in a linen sport coat, cotton pants and Docksiders, he was causally elegant as he walked me through the string of rooms, explaining the fiery process they use that dates back to the Byzantines. As we passed a stack of large ceramic pots in which they melt the “recipes” of color that have been passed down through four generations, Lucio ran his finger along the lip of a vessel drizzled with layers of once molten colors, so obviously at home with what was not just his business but his art as well.
A celebrated mosaic artist, Lucio’s compositions hang in the first-floor gallery of the B&B and glint from the walls in some of the rooms. His smile brightened as he told me he’d been raised with six brothers in the graceful home and its verdant central courtyard—a rarity to have so much space within the water-veined footprint of the island city. As I listened to him reminisce about taking the helm of the business when it was his turn, I imagined how the antics of seven young boys would have filled the home’s large open spaces with clamorous noise. History seemed to permeate every grain of the terrazzo floor and every splinter in the stalwart wood beams fortifying the ceiling.
History also skulked in every corner of the foundry. Smalti, as their sheets of glass are called, has been created there since 1888 when Angelo fired his first incandescent furnace. Strolling through the library, which is filled with shelf after shelf of glass that glows even in the muted light, I saw cerulean filed beneath lime and daffodil stacked next to cerise. As I sifted through a small crate of tiny glass squares, called tessera, Lucio handed me a gleaming turquoise oval with a gold square affixed to the back. This, he told me, is the starting point for the luminous gold mosaics they create by sandwiching a thin sheet of 24-karat white or yellow gold between two layers of glass.
He walked me through a classroom, a relatively new development at Orsoni, where anyone who wants to learn to make mosaics of their own designs can take workshops. By offering the courses, which were Lucio’s idea, Orsoni is creating future generations of mosaicists that may one day rival the artisans who used Orsoni smalti in the Trocadéro and the Basilica of the Sacre Coeur in Paris, and in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. Imagine a future Antoni Gaudi, who chose Orsoni smalti and gold for the spires and chapel of his Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, sitting at one of those tables creating an emerging work of art with a small hammer and a hardie!
Orsoni’s mosaics are so highly regarded, notes JoAnn Locktov, author of Mosaic Art and Style, because the company’s smalti swallows light rather than reflecting it, which is unusual. “If you light a match and hold it up to a mosaic created with Orsoni smalti, the reflected flame becomes smaller,” she writes of its depth and character. As I sat in Venice’s famed Piazza San Marco with her, I watched the strong afternoon sunlight effervesce the Orsoni glass in the mosaics that arched above the doors to the Basilica di San Marco. The commanding Biblical scenes seemed all the more amazing given that I’d held tessera in the palm of my hand that morning—such majesty from something so small and unassuming!
Lucio is creating a new collection of colors, which were inspired by a geometrically sophisticated painting hanging on a wall in his office. I can’t wait to see what will emerge from the heart of Orsoni’s blazing furnace once his recipe solidifies into a translucent slab with jewel-like skin. If you are interested in taking a “Living the Venice Workshop: History, Theory and Application of Mosaic Art” class, visit their site for a schedule and information, or call +39 041 2440002 or email.
Accommodations at Domus Orsoni are included in the tuition, and participants in the five- and ten-day classes are eligible for 3.2 CEU’s of accreditation from the ASID (American Society of Interior Designers), IIDA (International Interior Design Association), IDEC (Interior Design Educators Council) and IDC (Interior Designers of Canada). Three-day courses are not eligible for credits. Tuition for the workshops, which take place every month but August, is Euro 480 for the three-day class, Euro 750 for the five-day class and Euro 1,400 for the ten-day class. If you find yourself in Venice and you’d like to stay at Domus Orsoni simply to experience the history of the place, rooms start at Euro 80.
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