The Barefoot Count of the Grand Canal
A few years ago, when I was writing a novel about reckless young men in Venice, I stumbled upon a photo online that conjured the spirit of my characters. In it, a scruffy-haired twentysomething sits precariously on the edge of a palazzo rooftop, staring out over the city as if he owns the place. Later I discovered that the young man in that photo wasn’t a random backpacker but Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda, descendant of one of Venice’s most noble and socially well-connected families. The rooftop on which he’s perched is his family’s majestic 15th-century Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. By most definitions, the handsome young man in the photo really does own the place.
This past summer, on a blisteringly hot morning, Marcantonio stands at the helm of his speedboat. We are shooting across the choppy waves of the lagoon on our way to the venerable glass manufacturing island of Murano. Marcantonio is tall and tanned, with freckled skin from his daily swims, or perhaps his kitesurfing sessions off the Lido. His hair is light brown with a tinge of red, a color that used to be called “Venetian blond.” He’s dressed in a grubby pair of board shorts and a white T-shirt and baseball cap. The boat he’s driving isn’t one of the polished wood motoscafi with leather banquette seats beloved by rich touuropean aristos.
In point of fact, as we reach the Murano docks faster than I’ve ever crossed the lagoon, Marcantonio is here on business. He’s picking up supplies and checking in on one of the furnaces that produce a signature line of the striking high-end drinking glasses for his company, Laguna B.
Marcantonio was born in 1991 to Count Brandino Brandolini d’Adda (also a member, through his renowned mother, Cristiana, of the Agnelli car manufacturing empire) and Marie Angliviel de la Beaumelle (a Paris-born Rothschild on her mother Béatrice’s side). It was Marcantonio’s enterprising mother who founded Laguna B 30 years ago, offering a line of gorgeously idiosyncratic Murano glasses based on the ancient craft of goti de fornasa.
The Murano glassblowers had a long tradition of making water glasses for themselves from spare pieces left around the factories so they could keep cool while working in front of the 1,500-degree furnaces. According to Marcantonio, after Marie’s stepfather (Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre) gave her a set of these workaday glasses, she was inspired to create her own updated versions. Her “Goto” vessels, with their kinetic, flowery, one-of-a-kind designs in bold colors, have become so widely copied it’s impossible to walk down a Venice street today without finding shoddy imitations in shop windows.
“Running the company was so much work, and my mother was doing everything by herself,” Marcantonio says. “She was designing the collections, going to the furnaces on Murano, shipping the glasses out, handling the accounts…”
Marcantonio remembers, as a child, accompanying his mother to Murano and thinking that the whole enterprise of glass production felt mired in Venice nostalgia. “I didn’t realize how contemporary and radical my mother was being by starting Laguna B: a woman from Paris going to work alone in the furnaces with the Murano glass masters, especially back when there was so much misogyny in the industry. She was thinking forward, looking toward the future.”
Family friend Toto Bergamo Rossi, the director of the cultural nonprofit Venetian Heritage, recalls Marie’s powerful presence as an artist and entrepreneur. “So many young people today want to start their own design brands making sellable artistic pieces,” he says. “Marie did that 30 years ago, when no one had the idea. She had such a powerful sense of refinement and style.”
In 2013 Marie died of cancer, at age 50. There was no contingency plan for running Laguna B without her. Marcantonio, the second of her three sons, had developed a reputation as a party boy, so from the outside he might not have seemed an obvious successor. He had left Venice in his teens for boarding school in Switzerland, then to London for a stint at university before wandering off to Argentina with friends. He was studying in Milan at the time of his mother’s death. By his own admission, he was in a dark place.
“I was lost,” he says. “Partying, no real need to work. I was drifting, but when you touch the bottom, you need to find a way to emerge, even aiming toward the smallest light.” It would oversimplify the narrative to claim that taking over Laguna B proved a Road to Damascus moment, but in doing so Marcantonio slowly discovered a balance in life and a passion for work, which became an outlet for both his artistic and entrepreneurial spirits. In 2016 he returned to Venice full-time to devote himself to the company.
“Being back in Venice really helped,” he says. “It’s my home. I feel like the city’s mine. I could walk around the streets without shoes on and wouldn’t feel shamed or judged. It’s like one big palace for me. I love it here.”
Another stabilizing force has been his two-year relationship with Margherita Missoni, a designer and businessperson whose family founded the Missoni fashion house. They first met more than a decade ago, at the wedding of Marcantonio’s cousin Coco Brandolini, but didn’t reconnect until more recently. Missoni, who was in the midst of arranging a surprise birthday party for Marcantonio when I spoke with her, described him as someone who “understands and even appreciates complexities and contradictions.” In terms of his business and his aesthetics, though, “he’s pure and uncompromising in everything he puts his mind and hands on.”
After Murano we return to the Brandolini palazzo in Dorsoduro, which sits just south of the first hard turn below the Rialto bridge, near Ca’ Rezzonico. The palazzo isn’t simply the family home: Marcantonio’s 97-year-old grandmother Cristiana, the glamorous Brandolini matriarch, resides on the third floor (just above family friend and Laguna B collector Diane von Furstenberg). Tucked into the mansion’s flower-filled, statue-strewn back garden are the ground-floor offices of Laguna B. The walls are electric blue, with the company name emblazoned in neon. There are shelves of vibrant glassware competing with skateboards. The vibe is more Venice Beach than Doge’s Palace. It is here that the accounting, archiving, designing, shipping, and day-to-day business are conducted, with 12 employees embarked on an array of ambitious projects.
In the past decade Marcantonio has grown his mother’s company significantly. The main goal is to produce the highest-quality drinking glasses on the planet, ones made with such elegance and artistry they become collectible artworks. But as chief executive and art director, Marcantonio is also angling to move the company into the future.
“There’s no point in making things that are inspired only by the past,” he says. “What Murano was during the time of Venini and Martinuzzi can’t be done anymore. We have to adapt and change with the times. I think that’s what my mom would have done if she were still here.”
Laguna B produces an average of 15,000 glasses per year. That includes pieces from the heritage lines designed by Marie as well as a range of new patterns created by Marcantonio (including the extremely popular two-tone striped glasses and pitchers). There are also seasonal lines and even one-off collectibles; one recent collaboration with graffiti artist Marco Laudadio, inspired by Nutella glasses that Marcantonio collected as a boy, resulted in hand-engraved tumblers with a production limited to three sets, which sold out instantly.
Marcantonio’s youthful take on Murano design typifies the vital resurgence that has taken hold of Venice in recent years. But he has also proved himself shrewd and conscientious in expanding the line. For Laguna B he has already founded a publishing wing; a summer residency program in which teenagers from U.S. high schools impacted by gun violence are brought to Murano to learn the art of glassblowing; an environmental program called Vital that hopes to rebuild the salt marshes in the lagoon to safeguard the city’s fragile ecosystem; and Laguna B’s first flagship store, a two-minute walk from the palazzo (complete with a fountain he created in the window). In his free time Marcantonio designs glass sculptures, large, lava-like vessels made from the rough glass chunks (or cotissi) found in the Murano factories.
It’s 1 p.m. in the Laguna B office, and every day a different staffer is tasked with making lunch in the galley kitchen. Today it’s Marcantonio’s turn. He stands at the stove whipping up a spaghetti and zucchini dish for the team; he’s worried he has added too much salt. Perhaps of all the life-balancing lessons Marcantonio has learned in the past decade, the most difficult has been accepting his family’s unhumble background.
“I’ve felt rebellious ever since I was a kid,” he says. “I was a skater since I was 11, and I’d get mad if someone called me a count, or even if someone asked me to put on elegant shoes.” That spirit of rebellion continued well into adulthood, and it may just be the hardest addiction to break. During the Venice Biennale vernissage, Laguna B marked its 30th anniversary with a party at the palazzo. Tapestries with the Brandolini crown adorned the entrance hallways, and, feeling embarrassed, Marcantonio asked Cristiana if he could remove them for the night. She put her foot down.
“Now I see that she was right. Contrasts and contradictions are necessary, like heritage and the contemporary,” he says, warming up to the idea. “I’ve been living in contrast all my life, since I was a little kid, skateboarding through the palace.”
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Come On-A My Palazzo." SUBSCRIBE NOW
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