Cristina Cappellari is co-founder of Studio Saor, a studio – and, since 2021, also a shop – of illustrated architecture located in the heart of Cannaregio, between Campo Santi Apostoli and the Chiesetta dei Miracoli. Originally from Bassano, she has been living in Venice for seventeen years, first as an architecture student, then as a resident commuting to the mainland for work, and finally as a freelance professional and entrepreneur. Cristina told us about the time she arrived in Venice, her relationship with the city, her passions and inspirations, her hopes, and her visceral love for Venice’s humanizing dimension.
INTERVIEW BY VALERIA NECCHIO
PHOTOS BY CRISTINA CAPPELLARI / PORTRAITS BY VALERIA NECCHIO
V: Let’s start from the beginning. At what point do you place that first epiphany, that moment when you understood that Venice was a place you could call home?
C: It was 2005. I found myself on a sunny day in September at Santa Marta for the entry test at the faculty of architecture at IUAV, surrounded by a lot of interesting people. I said to myself: I like this place. It felt right. And just like that, I never left. I am one of the few who stayed after uni. In Venice, I immediately felt at ease, free, immersed in a very relaxed atmosphere that was a breath of fresh air as opposed to Bassano. Seventeen years have gone by and I haven’t even realized it.
V: What was Venice like in those years?
C: Living it as a student is a special experience, you are in a bubble, which is beautiful. I didn’t perceive it as so full of tourists, that’s for sure. I didn’t feel the anxiety caused by the masses of people filling its streets, which now, as a professional, I suffer a bit. My head is no longer so free and frivolous now, so I notice more of Venice’s complexities and difficulties. My perception is that it is suffering. And I would like to do something about it. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
V: What is your relationship with the city — what are your likes and dislikes, what makes it special to you?
C: One of the things I love the most about Venice is the fact that you can meet people from all over the world while living in a small town. I love crossing paths with friends on the street and going to the same places with the same people every day. And, more than anything, I love waking, the slow rhythm. You’re not in a car that speeds along the highway, it’s your body moving inside the city, feeling it and absorbing it, feeling the movement of water, seeing how the light, colors, and sounds change at different times of the day. It’s special.
The relationship with veneziani is a bit more complex. I am annoyed by the laziness, resignation, and negativity of certain locals…I sometimes fear I’ll turn into an equally complaining, frustrated, angry Venetian, and I don’t want that to happen to me. I consider myself lucky to live here and I think that those who have this luck should feel the responsibility to keep it alive, vital and thriving. On the contrary, too often there seems to be little awareness, little proactivity, and a lot of complaining. I understand how, for those who work in contact with tourists like I do, it’s not easy and can be frustrating. But I believe that we can all make an extra effort to be a little more welcoming. Sure, I get angry, too, sometimes, it’s human. But then I say to myself: stay calm, try to share, explain — even the reasons why we seem so angry. Try to improve the situation, don’t be dismissive.
Then, of course, there are aspects of living and sharing the city with the locals that are truly beautiful. I’m thinking of the Redentore festival or the “sagra”, of shared tables with neighbors, of living together in our shared living spaces – whether it’s the courtyard or the neighborhood. I think that if Venice were just a tiny bit less crowded, people would be more open to sharing, less hostile. It’s a city where it’s very difficult to ignore each other. We live so close to each other here, it’s so densely populated, you can hear your neighbors’ noises, you brush past each other on the street, you look at each other in the eye as you walk…feeling ignored is really sad, it goes against the logic of this place.
For example, when I see my neighbor smiling at me as we both lean out the window to hang our laundry, I understand that there’s this inclination to acknowledge each other, it’s natural. We saw it very clearly when we opened our shop in Cannaregio. I immediately realized that there was this curiosity. We had neighbors coming to us saying how nice it was to have us there. It was a beautiful moment.
V: Let’s take a step back. Tell me more about the Studio Saor project and how it started and evolved.
C: It started from our personal passions – Ferruccio’s (co-founder of Studio Saor, editor’s note) and mine – during the end of our studies. Our education is in architecture and partly in urban planning. And for both of us there was the urge to work on something of our own.
We liked to observe what surrounded us, and one day we said to each other: why don’t we start representing what we see in Venice, in our own way? The initial idea was to create our own “isolario” of the lagoon islands, all represented at the same scale, to be able to compare them in their contemporary form — which is radically different from their original function.
That’s when we realized that we liked doing things in series, putting them in order. We developed the entire project with this cataloguing method, using the same scale, the same way of representing things, and applied it to all the palaces, churches, and bridges in Venice. And this exercise made us get to know the city very well. We’ve always liked the idea of understanding how it evolved, starting from the key points – the church, the square, the well, the residential area around it, and then the parish, the neighborhood, the island, and finally the bridges, which unite all these microcosms.
From there, we thought: why don’t we make it more informative? We’re surrounded by representations of Venice – souvenirs – that we find ugly, banal, generic. We were analyzing and discovering so much about the city, so why not share this with others, perhaps contributing to making them understand that it’s much richer, more varied, and more complex than it seems? The souvenir is an easy way to share all this, but the conversations that spark from a simple poster or drawing – I’m thinking of the model of the MOSE, which allows us to talk about high tides, climate change etc. – are very interesting.
We launched the project to the public in 2016 with a market, which was also the first time we met other people in this industry – artisans, designers, artists – and started to understand what was happening in the city. From there, we went online. It was still a side project for both of us, but we wanted to make it grow. Then we started with retailers: bookstores or concept stores that offered us windows to display our work; and bookshops inside museums, which was a great way to test a product and see if it could work. And finally , two years ago, we opened our store and it’s working well. We are fortunate to be in a lively area, and to have a different and eye-catching window and offering. So when someone asks me what the difficulties are in opening a business in Venice, I always say: you can do it, it’s not even that difficult, you just have to do something different and well done and you’ll see that it’ll stand out and it’ll work. People are curious, they come in and ask about us and end up wanting to support us.
V: How did you find the space?
C: Through word of mouth. Many landlords are not very interested in the project per se. Whoever pays the highest rent gets the space. Fortunately, the person we found was very accommodating and showed us that he was pleased to give it to us because he felt he was contributing to something beautiful for the city. He gave us a chance to get started and prove ourselves.
V: This thing about word of mouth reveals the village-like dimension of Venice, doesn’t it?
C: It does! I love this about Venice, by the way. There is an undercurrent of people who want to help each other…the same thing happens with houses for residents – another hot topic. We support each other and rejoice in the relationships we cultivate because we all know that it can be hard. So we join our forces.
V: Tell me about your favorite things to do on a free day.
C: I go back to the idea of slow living, of walking. Sleeping in, having breakfast in one of those old-school pastry shops like Rizzardini, buying flowers at the Accademia kiosk, and going to the market, crossing paths with someone and stopping for a cicchetto at Do Mori or All’Arco. Coming back home, cooking, and then maybe taking a walk to the Zattere in the afternoon, or a longer walk to the end of San Pietro di Castello with stops in via Garibaldi – a place where Venetian life is still predominant – returning with the light of sunset. And the Lido in the summer. It’s been so many years since I’ve taken a vacation, so the Lido has become my outlet for that one day a week when I want to take a book, an umbrella, and be at peace.
V: This, given that social life in Venice can be surprisingly intense.
C: Yes! You always bump into someone. It’s a social life that unfolds outdoors, so wherever you go, you’ll find someone to stop and chat with, have a drink. We do it outside because space indoors is often too limited to do any entertaining.
People are often surprised about the size of most Venetian houses. Of course, you have to learn to be organised, learn to keep everything in its place, but on the other hand I find small places cosy. I prefer being a bit tight but to stay here, live this life.
On the contrary, I wonder: what must it be like to come to Venice, if you arrive, say, from the United States? I imagine the shock of someone who comes here for the first time. I can see how, if someone comes here and is used to big houses, big cars, hypermarkets, they feel uneasy and struggle to understand how we manage to live the way we do here.
V: I find your reflections fascinating and they match how I also feel about the city. So, I wonder if there is something that predisposes us to this being INCURABILI, that is, to become these people who fall in love with this city and then find everything else a bit alienating.
C: I don’t know, it’s a bit of magical thinking, I guess. I can’t quite explain it. We are certainly surrounded by beauty, which is a particular kind of beauty – a bit dusty, a bit decadent, but very moving. There is water, there is light and colors that you only find here. There is the fact that Venice is intimate and international. It’s a combination of many little things that create a perfect lifestyle for some of us. Of course, you have to see and appreciate these little things. They have to be important to you. It’s not for everyone.
V: Tell me about your next project, what are you working on?
We would like to expand Studio Saor and apply our method to map other cities. And then, we would like to use the basis of our work to welcome other Venetian illustrators, designers, and artists to see our work through their eyes. The need I feel now is to involve other people. Before opening the shop, I felt a bit bored being here, I was more closed off. Now I am super stimulated, I have been meeting a lot of people, also thanks to all the initiatives that are emerging, like How Do We Meet and this Inside Venice project.
V: And these are all grassroots movements, they were started by people who share a common vision and care about the city in a different way.
C: Yes, and this was really something that was needed. After the pandemic, I saw new and interesting communities of active people emerging, and it makes me confident and eager to contribute to giving a different direction to the city, to change what I don’t like. Having met both those who were born here and those who have arrived here later in life, I have the feeling that it will be mainly the latter who will trigger change, because we care, we have understood what is missing, what needs to happen.
V: So the hope for the city is: less complaints, more concrete collective actions.
C: Exactly. Let’s take action, let’s do it alongside those who come from outside and want to help, so we can keep bringing new stimuli in and can continue to open up to the world in an intelligent way. Collectivity is the lens through which we must look at the future of Venice, otherwise, if we close ourselves off in our individuality, each looking at our own little garden, we won’t go far. Cheers to new, shared endeavors.