Assouline's Venice: La Serenissima Is a Love Letter Pressed Between Covers
- 18h
- 5 min read
Released into the electric atmosphere of the 61st Venice Biennale, wrapped in century-old fabric from the legendary house of Fortuny, Venice's last operating textile factory, and unveiled through The Culture Lounge, a new podcast series devoted entirely to the art of making extraordinary things, this is the most ambitious volume in Assouline's Ultimate Collection.
The timing could not have been more intentional. As the 61st Venice Biennale opened its doors on May 9th, drawing the global art world into the city's labyrinthine streets under the theme In Minor Keys, conceived by the late and visionary curator Koyo Kouoh, Assouline arrived with Venice: La Serenissima, the most ambitious volume in their storied Ultimate Collection. Two institutions, one city, one defining season. The convergence felt less like coincidence than choreography.
"Venice. To visit is to be strongly jostled between fantasy and very real architectural splendor. Any book devoted to Venice is cause for celebration." ~ Peter Marino, American Architect
At 16 by 19 inches and nearly ten kilograms, Venice: La Serenissima is more architectural event than publication, an object with genuine presence, the kind that changes the room it enters. To call it a coffee table book feels almost impolite. Peter Marino, whose foreword opens the volume, captures the spirit exactly: few subjects in the canon of publishing deserve this kind of treatment as much as Venice does. The city is a perpetual negotiation between fantasy and stone. La Serenissima, the serene one, Venice's old epithet, has always managed to contain both.
What makes this volume worth your full attention isn't just its scale, though the scale is extraordinary. It's the author. Alberto Toso Fei is not merely a Venetian writer and historian. He is a direct descendant of the Murano glassmaking families who have shaped the city's identity since the fourteenth century. He carries Venice in his bloodline. His text follows the Republic from its mythic marsh-born origins through a millennium of maritime power, artistic supremacy, and political decline, and into its fiercely alive present: a city that invented quarantine, that built the philanthropic Scuole to care for its citizens, that gave the world the Biennale itself. The same institution now filling every campo and vaporetto stop with curators, collectors, and the restless, beautiful energy of contemporary art. Toso Fei doesn't narrate Venice from the outside. He excavates it.
The visual program is equally serious. Iconic photographs by Helmut Newton and Cecil Beaton, including Beaton's extraordinary 1951 images from Le Bal Oriental, the legendary masked ball thrown by the eccentric Carlos de Beistegui, appear alongside museum-quality reproductions pulled from ecclesiastical archives, rare books, and private collections. The effect is layered and cinematic, like moving through a city where every wall holds a century. Peggy Guggenheim appears. The Biennale appears. Paolo Veronese's ceiling frescoes at San Sebastiano appear. Nothing important has been left out, and yet the book never reads like a checklist.
"It's all a question of details, and you can feel something." – Prosper Assouline, Culture Lounge Podcast, Season 2
But the detail that elevates Venice: La Serenissima from extraordinary book to genuine artifact is Fortuny. To encase the Special Editions, Assouline turned to the most storied textile house in Venice, perhaps in the world. Founded by the polymath Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and operating from its Giudecca Island factory since 1922, Fortuny is today the last remaining textile factory in Venice. Its printing techniques, layered by hand using methods so guarded that Fortuny himself willed they should never be publicly revealed, produce fabric of almost impossible richness: cotton elevated to something luminous, metallic, alive. No two yards emerge identical. Time, as the house itself quietly insists, is the real luxury.
The partnership between Assouline and Fortuny is not merely aesthetic, it is philosophical. Both houses believe that beauty made without compromise is worth making slowly and worth preserving permanently. The two Special Edition clamshells, one in Fortuny's Richelieu weave in indigo blue and gold, one in Pigne, a silvery blend of ironweed and gold, are lined in burgundy silk and built not from cardboard but from wooden slats. A quiet architectural gesture toward the ancient timber piles sunk into the lagoon bed on which every building in Venice has stood for centuries. On the exterior of each: a copper title plaque and a three-dimensional hand-painted plaster medallion of the Lion of Venice, cast from an antique seal that Martine Assouline had kept in her personal collection for years. It is the kind of detail that turns an object into an heirloom.
And then there is the podcast. On May 1st, just days before the Biennale preview opened, Assouline formally launched Season 2 of Culture Lounge, hosted by Alex Assouline. The season introduces two new series alongside the original format: The Decisive Moment, in which Alex sits down with visionaries who have shaped culture and asks the question that cuts beneath biography and achievement, and Savoir-Faire, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Assouline's most extraordinary volumes. Venice: La Serenissima opens the Savoir-Faire series, in an episode where Alex sits down with Martine and Prosper themselves. It is a family conversation about craft, about obsession, and about what it means to build a book that is also, without apology, an object worthy of the city it honors.
Culture Lounge by Assouline · Season 2, Episode 3
Savoir-Faire: Venice, La Serenissima
Assouline family
Alex Assouline sits down with Martine and Prosper Assouline to go behind the making of the Ultimate Collection's most ambitious title. Published May 1, 2026 · 8 min.
In the episode, Prosper reflects on the hand-crafted metal crest of the Lion of Venice, cast from an antique seal the founders had quietly held onto for years, and on the binding realized by artisans they have trusted for three decades. It is a conversation as much about philosophy as craft. Martine and Prosper speak openly about their "no limits" approach to special editions: the conviction that when creating the best of the best, creative constraints simply do not apply. Venice: La Serenissima is, by their own account, the most complete expression of what an Assouline Ultimate can be. Not merely a book, but an object. A gesture toward beauty made permanent.
The Biennale connection is not incidental. Kouoh's theme, In Minor Keys, sought to quiet the noise of grand gestures and reconnect with the sensory, the emotional, the quietly insistent frequencies of art and life. There is something deeply resonant in that idea meeting a book about Venice, a city that has survived a thousand years precisely by attending to the minor keys: the quality of light on a canal at six in the morning, the weight of a Murano glass in the hand, the way devotion accumulates in layers of gilded pigment across a church ceiling. Assouline, Fortuny, and Venice are three institutions that have always understood this. To have them converge in a single object, in a single season, and to have that season narrated in real time through a podcast devoted to the art of making extraordinary things, feels genuinely rare.
It's all a question of details, Prosper said. And you can feel something. He was speaking about the binding, the silk, the copper plaque, the hundred-year-old fabric from the last factory left on Giudecca. But the sentiment belongs equally to the city it honors and to the season in which it was born. Venice: La Serenissima was made by people who looked up, looked closely, and refused to let anything be less than it could be. In a year when the art world has gathered in Venice asking what beauty is for, this book and the family behind it offer one very persuasive answer.
Listen to Venice La Serenissima on The Culture Lounge podcast by Assouline: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/savoir-faire-venice-la-serenissima
Purchase the Venice: La Serenissima, an Ultimate Collection title: https://www.assouline.com/products/venice-la-serenissima