The invite reads EVERYTHING MAGAZINE, ISSUE 1 in bold all-caps Arial, the only typeface we use. The event, the card continues, will last “6 pm till late,” which leaves it open to interpretations of what “late” means to different people. (Though the ambiguity was perhaps intended.)
The party was held to celebrate the launch of the publication our communications team had spent almost two years conceiving and crafting. It would also be the first public appearance of Everything publishing, the publishing house we had established a few months earlier, covering the universe surrounding Laguna~B—“as well as the ideas, encounters, and stories it generates,” as I wrote in the press kit.
At 11 pm so many people were waiting to come in, pushing the colossal wooden door—the only opening in the five-meter-high, centuries-old brick walls enclosing Palazzo Brandolini like a fortress, separating the garden from the long queue of guests spilled out from previous receptions. Mino, square-jawed, tattooed eyebrows, tattooed hands (barbed wire on the right), pushes back. He’s kind, but firm, and can turn into quite a menacing presence should anyone annoy him. Two other gentlemen in suits at the entrance help him in his security job.
It’s not nice nor “chic” (Erica’s words) to leave people waiting outside, even less reject them at the door. But as the evening turned into the night, the garden grew increasingly crowded. “Listen to me,” Mino told me at one point with a serious expression, reproachful toward my keenness of granting our guests more +1 than they had registered. The line was expanding, and he spoke with gravity. “We need to stick to the list. There are too many people. Now you do as I say.”
This was a private party, but word had quickly spread outside our guest list that this was a good, unmissable one (as every party Laguna~B hosted.) Because of (or thanks to?) Mino and his colleagues, not everyone who showed up unexpected managed to get in, but some did, and that was a good thing, as meeting new people generally is.
I had bought a pink pack of Vogue cigarettes just for the party. I wouldn’t normally smoke them, but I felt they would add a touch of glam to my persona. I was inspired by Francesca Faccani, who is a party soul who only wears black and tonight carries not one but two Vogue packs. In the first issue of EVERYTHING she wrote about bullshots (IYKYK), conversations, obsessions, flirts, crowded tables, and all the magic that comes with our parties, many of which she had witnessed.
Copies of the magazine stood lined up and stacked together on a table nestled among ivy bushes—the black and white wings on the cover forming an impressive geometric pattern–and sold out quickly. The first three roses of the season—two yellow, one baby pink—had just bloomed that morning. I had read this as a good sign, a flowery welcome to the new chapter we were just starting (and a good omen to the party). Only a few months earlier, Jacopo Benassi had photographed the still bare, thorny brambles for his feature in EVERYTHING, Un’Aragosta a Venezia. Now dense and blossoming, the roses look transformed since Benassi’s dramatic black and white portraits.
Another good omen had manifested the previous day, when Erica and Marta–friends and colleagues at Laguna~B and Everything publishing—had spotted Mimmo, the dolphin who’s been a permanent resident of Venice since last year. “It was almost dark, the blue hour. We were waiting for a vaporetto in the Giudecca canal, when I noticed a curious wave, something moving right under the water’s surface,” Erica told me. Hopeful to see the dolphin, they stood waiting, scanning the canal, but Mimmo wasn’t in sight. “Marta lost hope, but I didn’t,” she continued. “And when we got on the vaporetto, I kept believing that he would eventually show up. So I convinced Marta to stand on the deck, just in case. When the vaporetto docked, the dolphin appeared right in front of us, about ten meters away. Everyone else was getting off the boat, so they were turned the opposite way, toward the shore. In that moment, we were the only ones looking at the sea. And the dolphin was there for a long time.” The excitement was such that they screamed and hugged each other for interminable seconds. “The passenger next to me, who hadn’t seen anything, was visibly annoyed. But we didn’t stop.”
At the party I met Nally Bellati, a Venetian lady I had previously known only for her blog contessanally.blogspot.com and who now, being a reader of our newsletter, was complimenting me for my writing at Laguna~B. I told her immediately how nice it was to meet her in person, as I was also a reader of hers. Since my very first days at Laguna~B I had visited her blog regularly, as a source to learn more about the initial years of the company and the context where it was born. More a well written diary than a journalistic dispatch, Contessa Nally has covered happenings, exhibitions, parties, and the stories of many Venetian residents, from 2004 on, writing and taking the pictures herself. It’s an immense archive shedding a light on a very specific community, one that our founder Marie Brandolini also belonged to.
One post I keep returning to is titled Venice Biennale: Marie Brandolini d’Adda’s Cocktail Party from 2009. It opens with a photo of blue and green Berlingot glasses, straws leaning on the inside, perched on the marble windowsill of Marie’s terrace overlooking the Grand Canal. A well-loved part of her penthouse, the terrace was where Laguna~B’s party tradition began. Marie liked to have her friends around, and her glamorous gatherings became yearly appointments for her international guests visiting the Biennale. It was a good way to showcase her glasses but, most importantly, to have fun.
A number of private cocktails and dinners unfold at night after the Arsenale and Giardini close for the day. These Biennale nights form an alternate, complementary dimension that is less about art and more about relationships. As Francesca Faccani recently wrote in Vogue Italia, “a different way of experiencing the opening days of the Biennale emerges—when it’s still accessible only to industry professionals, journalists, and aficionados so determined that they manage to sneak into every opening.”
After much work, you need to release the tension. You need to contemplate the fruits of your labor as they’re out in the world, and celebrate. Looking around, it was exciting to see our ideas in print, finally a physical object, now circulating between people’s hands, browsed through and written on, or just popping out from people’s bags here and there. Yet I realized the excitement wasn’t just about the magazine. The relationships, the conversations, the ideas we have cultivated with our work, were now standing in the blossoming garden all at once, interacting and thriving in front of our eyes. It felt like a dream. Like having everything, all at once.
