The Olivetti Showroom: Carlo Scarpa's Venetian Interior

The Negozio Olivetti occupies a long, narrow room under the sixteenth-century arcade of the Procuratie Vecchie, opening directly onto the Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was commissioned in 1957 by Adriano Olivetti, the enlightened industrialist behind the Olivetti company of Ivrea, maker of typewriters and early computers. Scarpa was at the time Olivetti's art director, and the brief was described as a calling card in the Piazza San Marco: un biglietto da visita. Designed in 1957 and 1958 and inaugurated on 26 November 1958, the showroom is a modern insertion in one of the most ceremonial settings in Europe, and it answers the piazza stone for stone, joint for joint.

In a room the height of a generous domestic ceiling, he built a world.

Carlo Scarpa, born in 1906, had begun his career as a designer of glass for the Murano maker Venini, and the showroom reads as the work of a man who understood Venice as a material city before he understood it as anything else. He knew how stone takes a polish, how glass holds light, how brass survives salt. The interior is only 4 metres, or 13 feet, tall, and Scarpa inserted a mezzanine with a shallow stair so that the whole composition reads as one continuous sculptural interior. In a room the height of a generous domestic ceiling, he built a world.

Drawn at full size

Nothing in the showroom is casual, and the method of its making is part of its meaning. Every joint, every fixing, every change of material was considered, and the key elements were designed at full size: Scarpa gave the craftsmen 1:1 chalk drawings laid out on the workshop floor, not dimensioned plans. The staircase, the pillar, the thresholds were drawn the size they would be built, so that the hand of the designer met the hand of the maker without the mediation of scaled drawings. It is a medieval way of working applied to a modern interior, and it shows in the confidence of every junction.

The centrepiece is the free-standing flight of cantilevered steps in Aurisina stone, a grey-white Istrian limestone from Trieste, the same stone that paves the Piazza San Marco. The steps are shaped like a rotated L and separated by muntzmetal cylinders, a brass alloy; the tread surfaces are slightly convex, a curve Scarpa added after observing the reflections of light on a flat surface. The handrail is a steel tube bent in a single sinuous curve with no right-angle joints, and exposed brass screws accent the central axis. The treads vary in width so that some can double as display surfaces for typewriters and calculators: the stair is furniture, structure and vitrine at once. It is among the most photographed pieces of mid-century architecture in the world; the French architect Charles Zana has called it possibly the most Instagrammed piece of architecture.

Every material answers Venice

Around the stair, the material palette is a love letter to the city, written in stone, glass and brass. The floor is a mosaic of Murano glass paste tesserae set in terrazzo, laid in horizontal alignment, an echo of the floors of the Basilica di San Marco, and it is raised 30 centimetres above the level of the piazza to protect the room from acqua alta, the high water that periodically claims the square. A central full-height pillar is clad in polished Aurisina marble slabs with roughly chipped top edges that deliberately expose their role as cladding, separated by thin horizontal bands of muntzmetal: structure confessed as surface, surface detailed as craft.

Brass is used throughout for fixings and transition details, chosen to resist corrosion in the saline Venetian air while adding a golden elegance. There is teak in the display shelves and in a grating that covers the water-side entrance and extends up to the first floor. Panels of gold are inset into walls. Secret doors and vitrines hide behind sliding sections of stone. Venetian plaster, stucco, various wood species, metal and glass complete the palette. At the entrance, an abstract bronze sculpture by Alberto Viani, a gilded bronze nude, stands on a black marble slab in a shallow raised basin of water, reflected in the water. A woven metal gate, stone panels and a glass storefront mediate between the arcade and the interior. Every material answers Venice: the stone of the piazza underfoot, the glass of the basilica in the floor, brass chosen against the salt air, a floor lifted 30 centimetres against the water.

The showroom followed Scarpa's work on the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, the Venezuela pavilion at the Biennale and the Canova plaster-cast gallery at Possagno. It is one of the very few Olivetti showrooms whose structure survived the company's withdrawal from its retail spaces; the Paris, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Rome stores were all lost or transformed. The display cases were designed with specific lighting angles to show the Olivetti machines under ideal conditions. Commerce and craft were designed together, at the same drawing board, at full size.

The gift shop years and the return

The showroom operated as the Olivetti flagship from its 1958 opening until 1997, displaying typewriters and calculators made in Ivrea, until Olivetti's commercial decline and the shift from typewriters to personal computers made the luxury Piazza San Marco location unviable. From 1997 to 2011 the space was occupied by a tourist gift shop; merchandise filled the room and the staircase was partially obstructed by display racks, a case frequently cited in preservation literature as an example of the vulnerability of modernist commercial interiors to re-tenanting. The most carefully detailed room in Venice spent fourteen years as a shop selling souvenirs.

In 2010 and 2011 the space underwent a careful conservative restoration directed by Tobia Scarpa, Carlo Scarpa's son, the same architect who completed the Brion Memorial after his father's death. The property is owned by Assicurazioni Generali, and its management has been entrusted to FAI, the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano, the National Trust for Italy. It reopened to the public in 2011. The current display reproduces the original 1958 setup, with only period 1950s Olivetti machines, typewriters, calculating machines and early computers, on view, and the space also hosts temporary exhibitions. As of 2025, admission was 10 euros per person, including an audioguide and information material; FAI closes the space each January and February for annual maintenance and restoration work.

No individual formal heritage designation for the showroom itself could be verified in the sources consulted. For context, Venice and its Lagoon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1987, and the showroom stands within the inscribed area, but it carries no individual UNESCO listing of its own. It does not need one. It is an interior that could exist nowhere else, in a room that was designed to be looked at the way Venice is looked at: slowly, and from the waterline up.

A calling card in the piazza

Adriano Olivetti was the enlightened industrialist behind the Olivetti company of Ivrea, and his choice of Scarpa as both art director and architect was a statement about what industry could be. The brief, un biglietto da visita in Piazza San Marco, asked for a shop that would represent the company the way a visiting card represents a gentleman: small, exact, unforgettable. Scarpa answered with a room in which typewriters were displayed like sculpture and the staircase was dimensioned to hold them. The machines of Ivrea, products of factories and engineers, were given a setting of Aurisina stone and Murano glass, as if to insist that industry and craft were not opposites.

Scarpa's beginnings as a designer of glass for the Murano maker Venini run through the whole interior. He understood glass not as a flat industrial product but as a material with depth, colour and light, and the floor of glass paste tesserae is the work of a man who had spent his youth thinking about what glass can do. The brass details, chosen against the saline air, show the same material intelligence: beautiful because they survive, surviving because they are beautiful.

What the restoration returned

The 2010 and 2011 restoration, directed by Tobia Scarpa, was an act of architectural memory. Fourteen years as a gift shop had filled the room with merchandise and hidden the staircase behind display racks; the restoration stripped all of that away and returned the room to its 1958 state, down to the period machines on the display surfaces. That the director was Carlo Scarpa's son, the architect who had completed the Brion Memorial after his father's death, gave the work a continuity that few restorations can claim. The hand that finished the father's memorial returned the father's showroom to itself.

Managed by FAI and owned by Assicurazioni Generali, the showroom now operates as a small museum of itself: the 1958 display reproduced, temporary exhibitions in rotation, visitors admitted for 10 euros with an audioguide, the doors closed each January and February for maintenance. It is a modest operation for an immodest room, and that is as it should be. The Negozio Olivetti was never large. It was exact.