We meet on 15 July, 2023, to celebrate the traditional Venetian Festa del Redentore or Feast of the Redeemer, which takes place every third Sunday in July to commemorate the end of the plague that struck the city from 1575 to 1577. Vincenzo and Claudia Rose De Cotiis will take part in the procession, walking to the Church of Il Redentore in Giudecca.
They live the city by personally immersing themselves in it, entranced by the history and culture that make it a unique open-air museum. It is a happy encounter between the De Cotiis’s outlook and the spirit of Venice, a porous merging of worlds that manifests itself in a harmonious balance of tradition and contemporaneity within the private abode that the designer has created on the first floor, or piano nobile, of Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. The palazzo, in the sestiere, or neighbourhood, of San Marco is also home to the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation for music studies.
Murano glass chandeliers, decorated ceiling beams, terrazzo floors and carved burl-walnut doors are a peep into the past lives of this building – elements that are now in the private residence of the De Cotiis family. This architect-artist has created layers of time, each one marked by its own style, and has enhanced the intrinsic beauty of the past by breathing new life into this imposing dwelling via the unique language of his artworks.
Paraphrasing Joseph Brodsky who in his Watermark: An Essay on Venice (1989) wrote of the connection between Venetian architecture and the anarchy of water “that draws the notion of form”, the new De Cotiis residence is a present-day example of how space is still perfectly capable of responding to time with the only property it does not possess, namely beauty.
