The Republic of Ink

This experience follows a chapter of Venice's history shaped by paper and print. In the 15th century, between 150 to 200 presses were at work here, and the city was producing 15% of all titles printed in Europe. What survives today is a handful of artisan workshops scattered across Cannaregio, San Polo, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro — each carrying a different form of Venice’s paper tradition forward. Inside each workshop, Lucia introduces you to the artisans, to their machinery, materials, and techniques — and to lesser-known corners of Venice along the way. You visit a Venetian papier-mâché mask workshop, a studio where paper is folded, printed, and bound in a contemporary interpretation of tradition, and a screen-printing atelier passed from father to son. The walk ends at a small print shop still using two Heidelberg presses and a hand press — not far from the house of Aldo Manuzio, the Renaissance printer whose editions of Greek and Latin classics changed the shape of the book itself.

Venice was where Europe's print culture took shape — where italic type was invented, where the portable book was born. What passed through workshops and presses here shaped how an entire continent read, learned and thought. This experience highlights the paper and print traditions of Venice — a part of its history that lives in materials, gestures, tools, and workshops. What gives it real depth is the contact with the artisans who are keeping the tradition going. You realize that the only way something survives is because someone chooses to pass it on. These artisans preserve older techniques and materials while also finding new artistic uses for them, so the encounter is grounded in continuity as well as invention. Through Lucia, who knows them personally and has selected them as part of a coherent storyline, you leave with a sense of Venice as a working city — one where the culture that once traveled in printed books still travels today, in the hands of the people who carry it.

Lucia Bondetti is a Venetian art historian with a postgraduate degree in Art History and Conservation of Cultural Heritage and a master's in Business Administration for Art. Her professional path has taken her to the Musée du Louvre in Paris and to Venice's own Gallerie dell'Accademia, before returning her to the city she grew up in. With Lucia, Venice opens through stories that reveal its many layers — past and present, famous and lesser-known — brought to life with the clarity and warmth of someone who is showing you a place she genuinely loves.

Comfortable walking shoes — Venice is entirely on foot, and this walk covers four neighborhoods.