Stefano&Daniele Attombri, Jewellery Designers

We are Stefano and Daniele Attombri. We’ve been doing our job for the past 29 years.

We happened to start working on this by accident, when we were still very young, first by producing both bags and necklaces, and later focusing only on the latter and jewelry, inventing our own personal techniques, in which we combine glass and metal.

We use old Murano glass pieces, which we had bought as a stock 25 years ago from a closing glass factory, and we combine them with metal threads, that we interweave, without gluing or welding them. It’s more like a needlework; we only use Murano glass and we basically gave a second life to an ancient tradition that had been lost for a while.

Definitely, travels.We are always traveling, and that is when we get inspired the most, especially when we see people; when we see people, we immediately think of how they could be wearing our creations: this is surely a continuous stimulus and a source of inspiration.

Venice means so much to us! We were born in Mestre, but we moved to Venice about 20 years ago. Venice has given and is giving us so much it is surely a continuous source for ideas and gives us the chance to meet people from all around the world and it is also a strong visiting card, which is always much appreciated, in every country we go to.

We sure did, it’s a cycle that continuously changes. Venice itself changes. Some people say it changed for worse. We have to look at the good things: the whole world comes to see Venice, and in the world, there are good things and bad things, therefore we have to accept this fact and counter it, by trying to give prestige to the city of Venice, rather than offering cheap low-quality productions.

Everything that we ever sold, for we never took inspiration from anyone so it’s difficult to give you a number but we can say it’s thousands of crafts.

When we started, when we decided to relaunch these old techniques, to experiment with them, we decided, for example, not to buy any fashion magazine anymore nor to watch TV either, to avoid being influenced in our production. Basically, we decided to burn down every bridge and to work only with our fantasy.

This is one of the necklaces that we bring as an example: it’s made by weaving a very thin thread and combining it with old Murano glass. We created this model for Dolce&Gabbana, who wanted it for their collections.

Well, for a necklace like this one here, I need 5 whole days. About the same time that he needs for the one shown before

Yes, right.

The message for who’s coming to Venice is to look for this kind of shops; there are few like this, but they do exist. [It’s important] To find them and try to help them, discouraging instead the purchase of goods that come from other countries and are, both looking at the quality of the materials and at the quality of the production, very poorly made.