Caffè Quadri was founded in the early eighteenth century; it originated in the building of the Procuratie Vecchie and progressively occupied an increasingly articulated portion of it. The Procuratie are characterized by an architectural modularity based on the minimum space for a shop. In 1858, the engineer Cadorin made a decisive change to this scheme by transforming the shops into scenographic spaces complete with sets inspired by the Orient (a construction that is very similar to the Caffé Florian, built in the same period directly across the Piazza by the same Cadorin) according to the traditional concept of the coffee shop as a meeting place and arena for Venetian life.

In the early twentieth century, following the demolitions that became necessary after the bell-tower in Piazza San Marco collapsed, Cadorin’s sets were removed though the spaces of the Quadri maintained the typology of Cadorin’s theatrical space, but they were renovated with an “eighteenth-century-like” image inspired by Longhi, based on a common stereotyped image of Venice.

The Caffè Quadri is therefore a metaphor of Venice as a wonderful double theatrical deception: it is a false eighteenth-century image built in the early twentieth century in a space created in 1858 by modifying the interiors of a sixteenth-century architectural work.

The approach is to enhance this deception, by doing the best to maintain the complexity of the levels of reading and the system of syntactic relationships (typology, spaces, proportions, volumes, structures, building systems) of the architectural text where they are still whole, and to acquire them as a non-mimetic but inspirational design criterion where they need to be created.

All of the above is based on the premise that the specificity of Venice is the dialectic contamination and the homogenization of diversities in time and space rather than the contraposition, the fracture, the negation and the exclusion of the other from the self. Herein lies the original spirit of the great theatrical fiction of the Quadri, the “Caffè del Turco”, the meeting ground between Venice and the Orient.