A 16th-century trading hall overlooking the Rialto Bridge, with period details, art exhibits, and a rooftop terrace offering peerless views of the Grand Canal. A new attraction in Venice? Yes, but not in the way you’d think. This isn’t a new museum or gallery for La Serenissima; it’s a department store. But T Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which opened last October, is a department store like no other.
The historic Fondaco dei Tedeschi building dates back to 1228, when it was built as a trading hall for German merchants in the heart of the Rialto market area. Twice destroyed by fire, its current incarnation was built in 1506, though it was subsequently reworked by Napoleon—who used it as a customs hall— and then Mussolini. In fact, until 2009, when the Benetton family bought it with the aim of transforming it into a department store, it was the city’s main post office.
“We had to work against local resistance,” Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, the architect overseeing the project for Rotterdam-based OMA, told Condé Nast Traveler. “People thought the building was something you could not touch—they thought the idea that it was being privatized and turned into a department store was in itself obscene.”
That’s hardly a word that springs to mind upon seeing it. The store—which has an entrance directly on the Grand Canal, for those who want to arrive by water taxi, as well as one for pedestrians—is centered round a vast atrium, flanked by colonnades, with a Philippe Starck-designed café in the middle serving food by Alajmo, the local family behind Piazza San Marco’s iconic Quadri restaurant and café.
Around it, the store fans out over three floors of “galleries”, all overlooking the atrium, with Renaissance-style pennants demarcating the different departments, which stock over 300 mostly luxury brands. Original details spanning centuries have been preserved throughout, from a 16th-century fireplace in the womenswear section and painted beams in the arcades around the atrium, to Napoleonic-era flooring on the ground floor and the concrete-beamed ceiling from the 1930s.
“We decided to approach history objectively,” says Pestellini Laparelli. “This isn’t a perfectly historical monument, but one that’s seen multiple changes across the centuries. By walking through the building, we want you to walk through its history.”
The architects left their own, 21st-century mark in the form of a rooftop “event pavilion” and exhibition space. Currently, it houses an installation by Fabrizio Plessi, "Under Water," accompanied by a soundtrack by Michael Nyman, who performed a charity concert there in November. (A new exhibition, as yet under wraps, will take its place in April.) Although the store is clearly aimed at tourists—Hong Kong-based operators DFS specialize in duty free shopping around the world–they’re making a concerted effort to attract locals. There’s even a focus on locally made products: alongside labels like Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Brioni, there’s a mini food-hall stocking fine Italian food and drink, and a selection of works by local artisans, from Burano lace to “furlane”, traditional gondolier slippers. Locals, traditionally resistant to outside companies setting up in the city, are already packing out the café and strolling round the building.
But despite the architecture, events, brands and luxury fittings (this is a place where the escalators are scarlet and the elevators gold), the Fondaco’s trump card is its rooftop balcony, an extension of the traditional wooden Venetian altana. Situated in a prime spot on the Grand Canal, at the Rialto bend, the views from the sixth story are possibly the best in the city. Directly below you, vaporetti and water taxis thread under the Rialto bridge; to the right, a traghetto (public gondola) ferries locals, their shopping trolleys bulging with fresh fish and vegetables, from the 700-year-old Rialto market to the busy Strada Nova street; fabled buildings within view include Ca’ Pesaro, the city’s modern art gallery, the fluted gothic columns of Ca’ d’Oro, and Ca’ Foscari, the sumptuous university building at the next curve of the canal.
And then there’s the skyline. Venice is famously a city seen from below, but the bird’s-eye view, in a way, is even more astonishing. The panorama sweeps 360 degrees around the city, from the domes of St Mark’s basilica to the campanile of San Francesco della Vigna—and then goes further, beyond the distant islands of Murano and Burano to the Alps shimmering in the distance. It’s genuinely breathtaking— “privileged in every sense of the word,” as Pestellini Laparelli calls it—and, what’s more, it’s free. You’ll never find a Venetian taking photos from the bell-tower of St Mark’s; but you’ll struggle for space amongst them, admiring their city from up here.
Napoleon famously called Piazza San Marco the “drawing room of Europe”. Two centuries later, it may finally have met its match.
