For more than 500 years, people have marveled at the Torre dell’Orologio, the magnificent clock tower on Piazza San Marco in Venice. But only two visitors were so inspired by it that they created a watch company called Venezianico, or, in English, Venetian.
Alessandro and Alberto Morelli, the brothers who founded the brand in 2017, said they became curious about the cross at the very top of the tower while they were students a decade ago at Ca’ Foscari University in the city. After asking around, they learned that the cross, which has four arms of equal length, was meant to symbolize harmony and timeless beauty. That knowledge, they said, triggered a decision — and eventually their brand’s logo.
“We had a passion for watches, but we didn’t have the budget to be collectors,” Alberto, 32, said sitting in the company’s headquarters in San Donà di Piave, a city of about 40,000 residents that is about 40 minutes by train northeast of Venice. “But as lovers of design and architecture we thought, ‘Why don’t we do something on our own?’”
They started a Kickstarter crowd funding campaign that reached 800,000 euros ($827,910) and then flew to Hong Kong to find a watchmaker to create their prototype. (Some watch assembly still is outsourced to Hong Kong and Switzerland, but the more complicated ones are assembled in-house.)
That first model, called Nereide, was named for the 1913 Nereide submarine, “a marvel of Venetian naval engineering,” Alberto said. The watch, which debuted in 2017, is water-resistant to 200 meters (almost 660 feet) and is available in 30 iterations.
One, the Nereide Aureo, is a 42-millimeter steel model with a 24-karat gold dial that Alessandro, 31, said resembled the gold leaf common on Venetian furnishings and was applied using a traditional “tumbling” technique. The watch, powered by a Sellita automatic movement, is €1,295.
The brothers wanted their brand to honor the city, to draw on the motifs and materials “that remind us of the traditions and techniques of the local artisans,” Alessandro said. So all the watches’ case backs have engravings of the historic scenes or locations that inspired their names.
And some of the Nereide dials are made of aventurine, a type of glass created in Venice in the 17th century that is characterized, according to the Venezianico website, “by needlelike metal micro-inclusions, which produce a multitude of glittering reflections, reminiscent of the stars in the night sky.”
Soon after the Nereide came the Redentore collection, a sleek 40-millimeter steel design named after Il Redentore, or Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, the 16th-century basilica on Venice’s Giudecca island that was designed by Andrea Palladio, the Italian architect considered the father of neo-Classical style. And there is the Bucintoro collection — the brand’s chronograph, or stopwatch — named for the ceremonial vessel that the doges of Venice used until the late 18th century. While four steel models still are offered from €1,595, a 69-piece limited edition featuring Lemania 1873 movements sold out last year, each at €4,500.
The brand’s fifth, and newest, collection, scheduled for shipment March 21, is titled Arsenale, a 40-millimeter steel design named for the city shipyard founded in 1104 that turned Venice into a maritime power.
The brand’s current projects are a tourbillon, a design that counters the effects of gravity on time keeping, and a 32-millimeter design created with women in mind so, Alberto said, “we can bring a bit of Venice to their wrist.”
The brothers said one of their primary goals was producing luxury watches that also were affordable, so they sell only through the brand website, the headquarters store and at more than 200 sales locations around the world. “We have retailers. No agents. No distributors,” Alberto said.
The company also has been getting attention. Two of Venezianico’s watches competed in the 2024 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the annual industry awards event. One was the Redentore Bellanotte, which pays tribute to Venice’s annual observance of the end of the 1576 plague. The watch has a four-level dial: a starry sky in aventurine, a small off-center mother-of-pearl sub-dial, a satin disc depicting fireworks and a rhodium-plated bas-relief of the Doge’s Palace and Il Redentore as the background. The second was the Redentore Historia Temporis, which has a dial design inspired by a late 17th century coin.
And in 2022, Forbes Italia named Alberto among its 100 Young Leaders of the Future Under 30.
Alberto, who has a degree in the Greek classics, is the brand’s chief executive and in charge of concept and design. And Alessandro, who has degrees in economics and marketing, oversees operations and production — or, as Alberto explained, “he’s in charge of how to make things happen.”
Things happen in a palazzo that the brothers bought and turned into a headquarters for themselves and their 10-member staff and a store. Like their watches’ designs, its interior has Venetian-style touches of gold in the veins of a marble table top and edges of a vitrine; desks and display cases made in oak, the wood used for the pilings that dot the Venetian lagoon.
The building, Palazzo Baradel, was built on San Donà di Piave’s main street in 1929, part of the town’s reconstruction after World War I. When the brothers began to consider the purchase, it had been vacant, and an eyesore in the town center, for years. But when they opened the doors to the 500-square-meter (5,380-square-foot) renovation in May 2024, the brothers said, 1,000 people showed up to celebrate.
Mayor Alberto Teso was among them. “It’s important to have a young, successful enterprise, started by two brothers who grew up here,” he said in a recent interview. “We are a small town, but I hope this will inspire other young people to come here and start something new.”
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