VENICE
Photos by Maria Lannino
At Kilometre Paris, each piece seeks to tell a story of travel through Couture & Embroidery. With our 'Caravans', we invite you to join us on our worldly travels and experience unique events in which fashion meets storytelling.
Through our stops around the world, we shine lights on each of our 'muses': those exceptional individuals who inspire us with their passions and their individuality. This ninth edition of Caravan takes place in Venice — a city built by hands, stitched together by water, and kept alive by those who still believe beauty must be made, touched, and transmitted. Join us on an unforgettable journey of fashion and creativity.
Lara Morell
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Lara Morell. She was born in England, but she chose Venice as her real home. Ten years ago she arrived for just a few months — she ended up staying for good. The city pulled her in with its rituals, its daily rhythm, and that slow logic tied to the water. She lives on the island of Giudecca, where her fiancé was born. The place still feels like a small village. Neighbors greet each other by name. Boats sit moored right by the doors. Life gets measured out by the tides.
She studied art in London at Saint Martins, then photography in Torino. For several years she edited My Art Guides, an international platform focused on contemporary art. Later she joined Osti e Orto, an association of Venetian restaurateurs who share land on Sant Erasmo to grow their own produce. She worked the fields with her own hands during that time. It helped her rediscover patience and a sense of purpose. Now she is returning to art full time.
For Lara, craftsmanship means necessity more than nostalgia. It is what keeps a city truly alive. Venice got built by hands, not machines — the only real way to honor it is to keep creating with touch and care every day. She speaks often of Matteo Tamassia, the boatbuilder whose workshop in Treviso can fit only one boat at a time. He built hers personally — a mix of sampierotta and cofina. "It felt like a birth," she smiles. They even had a priest there, along with friends and a full celebration. All of it just for that boat entering the water.
Gioele & Heiby Romanelli
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muses: Gioele and Heiby Romanelli. They grew up in the lagoon. Venice feels like something they inherited rather than just a spot to visit. Hospitality flows in their family like a steady undercurrent — five generations deep. Gioele's great grandmother started the first family hotel. His grandfather was a photographer who put portraits of guests on all the walls. In 1965 his parents opened the Hotel Flora, a quiet escape right behind the busy San Marco area. Then came Casa Flora, born as a modern apartment from a student workshop, feeling part home and part test in how to live like a Venetian.
Together they now manage three spots: Flora, Novecento, and Casa Flora. Each looks different in design, but all share one main idea — hospitality as a real feeling. A hotel is more like a story than a building. They took that idea further with Inside Venice, their online journal collecting voices from locals and artisans, stories that don't often get told. Gioele notes there is far too much negative talk about Venice today. They aim to highlight its real strength — the people who pour everything into keeping the city going.
Craftsmanship means a lot to Gioele — whether in a hotel, a table, or a meal. He just read Salvatore Ferragamo's autobiography. It taught him a key point: the future comes from stepping back a bit and remembering the old ways of making. Their version of Venice skips the postcard views and focuses on the real living city. Water, hands, and a steady belief shape it all. "You have to stay amazed," he smiles. "The day I find someone who is not — that person could never be my friend."
Carmela Cipriani
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Carmela Cipriani. She was born in Venice. In that city, it means she was born on water. When you open your eyes there, you see light that is already broken — multiplied and liquefied in strange ways. For Carmela, beauty did not come as some big discovery. It came as an inheritance. The canals served as her first mirrors. The campanili acted like her compass. Venice, she says, is not built of stone. It is built of echoes — footsteps on wet bridges, bells dissolving into fog, oars making a slow gasp against green water.
She grew up beneath Peggy Guggenheim's window — that is the myth of Dorsoduro, she tells it like a fable. Peggy and her unfinished nose. The surgery stopped mid-cut. She wore sunglasses like armor. That woman turned imperfection into legend. Her life felt half-real and half-dream, like Venice itself. Carmela calls herself Venetian before anything else — a writer, photographer, and chronicler. She has written about Venice not as a monument but as a heartbeat. Every wall hides a story. Every pigeon acts as a friend. Every canal serves as a secret mirror.
Ask her why craft matters, and her voice softens. "Because it is intimate," she says. "It is an interior world translated into matter." True craftsmanship, for her, is the soul made visible through the hand. She tells stories of Venetian artisans who worked leather, hair, or wood as though it were silk. There is Segalin, who made shoes shaped like gondolas for Luigino Rossi — no one else could ever replicate those shoes. "The craftsman," she says, "is always an artist. Not by title. But by need."
Gloria Rogliano
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Gloria Rogliano. She has lived her whole life around water — not something passed down from family, but a natural pull. One day when she was twenty-three, she got into a boat. It seemed like she had been rowing her entire life. The motion was already there in her body. She learned the voga alla veneta style, the old way of standing and stroking, where the boat moves forward through steady effort, not by rushing. She became one of Venice's top rowers — but winning was never her main aim.
"It went beyond just winning," she says. "It meant getting the place itself. The light there. The birds. The mudflats called barene." This year she will row again at the Historical Regatta in September 2026 — at age sixty-two, with a young woman who is nineteen. Two generations side by side. Two styles of rowing. Two forms of power. "I pass on what I have learned. She brings fresh drive. It shows women can push on, no matter their years."
Her dream, if she had unlimited resources: Barca e Casa — Boat is Home — to guide elderly and disabled Venetians who grew up by the water but now miss the sense of gliding over it. "They long to view the sea once more. To feel alive again." After that, a school. A basic kind. "No computers. No phones. Nothing showy or forced. I want embraces. Smiles. Hard work. A place to learn real living. Where we teach each other. I take from the young ones. They take from me."
Saverio Pastor
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Saverio Pastor. He began at sixteen and a half — already too old, his master said. In Venice, one was meant to start younger, when the body still obeyed and the hands hadn't yet learned impatience. So he watched. For two months he did nothing else, watched eight hours a day, the ritual of sawdust and silence, the rhythm of hands carving the city's bones. Then one day he was allowed to touch the wood. That was nearly fifty years ago, and he has never stopped.
He crafts oars — long, lean extensions of the arm — and the forcole that cradle them, wooden sculptures of motion and restraint. They aren't props; they're vertebrae in the body of the lagoon. Each curve speaks its own dialect: one whispers of turning, another commands the boat to slow, another bites against the current and throws it backward. Touch one, and you feel it — the choreography of a city written in wood. "There is nothing casual in the shape," he says. "Every line answers to function." In his hands, the forcola is choreography frozen in wood — a curve of woman, a whisper of Ferrari, elegance made useful.
Only four or five artisans remain like him — men who still shape wood the way their fathers did. Venice once had hundreds; now it has traffic. Too many engines, too many wakes, waves that batter the canals and bruise the wood. "Manual work," he says, "is what defines humanity." To him, touch is intelligence — a way of knowing what others overlook. A forcola takes time, patience, precision, listening. It should cost thirty thousand euros, he says laughing, but sells for fifteen hundred. It will last thirty years. Longer than the man who carved it, perhaps.
Servane Giol
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Servane Giol. She speaks of Venice the way some speak of a lover — with ache, with loyalty, with a kind of warning folded inside devotion. For her, the city breathes. It isn't scenery; it's sinew, an organism stitched together by the head and the hand, the mind that imagines, the hand that obeys. When one forgets the other, the pulse falters. Once, she says, there was a Biennale — not of art as we know it, but of the decorative, the intimate, the human. Then 1972 arrived like a door slamming shut. And overnight, the dialogue died.
"The masters continued," she says, "but without a thinking head, without someone to say, let's experiment." She names the ones who once spoke that shared language: Scarpa, Venini, the artists who built bridges between intellect and gesture. Without them, the dialogue broke. Burano's lace fell into near extinction. Five lace makers remain, perhaps fewer. To make a butterfly takes six hundred hours — time the modern world no longer pays for.
And yet Venice always returns. "It's cyclical," she says. "1920, everyone arrives. 1940, everyone leaves. 1950, they come back." Since the pandemic, the world has turned toward Venice with a feverish hunger — for beauty, for calm, for art that breathes. Her advice is simple: stay. Walk. Look. Drink water from a Venetian glass, invented here. Put on your glasses — Venetian, again. Look at yourself in a mirror — another Venetian gift. "Every morning," she says, "you make three gestures born in Venice. You just don't realize it."
Antonia Sautter
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Antonia Sautter. She was not born into costume — she willed herself into it. One day, thirty-three years ago, in a small shop where she sold corsets and accessories, a man from Monty Python walked in. Terry Jones. He asked to speak about Venice. She spoke about the city, about imagination, and he offered her work on a BBC film set in Byzantium. She had no experience. No training. Only nerve. That night she didn't sleep. The next morning she returned and said: "Trust me. I'll do it all." And she did.
Today she orchestrates an entire world of hands. Five couturières work with her year-round, twenty-five when Carnival swells. In her atelier, fabric rises like breath, sequins fall like light. "The hand," she says, "translates the heart." In a century obsessed with speed and screens, she defends the slow pulse of making. To create by hand is, for her, a form of meditation — a recovery of time, of essence, of presence. The thread becomes a line of thought; the gesture, a kind of prayer.
Her dream, if money were no object: a vast laboratory of beauty where young artisans could learn from old masters, where retired craftsmen could pass on their art before it disappears. "Not a school," she insists, "a space of transmission." Venice needs youth, and youth need wonder. Her mother was Venetian, her father German — he came to Venice once and never left. "Venice provokes love," she says, half-smiling. "It traps you with beauty." She still returns to Pellestrina, that sliver of land where her grandmother, another Antonia, first breathed salt air.
