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In Venice — The Giberto Boutique
By Vincent Meylan

Every day, tens of thousands of tourists pass in front of this new boutique. Dedicated to the art of glass, it was conceived by Count Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga and bears his first name.

For decades, Venetian glass carried a slightly kitsch reputation. That image is now changing. The Venetian “souvenir” has taken on a more refined, design-driven identity—one that now answers to a name displayed beneath the last arcade of the iconic Rialto Bridge: Giberto.

The stemless glasses are flawless, whether engraved or tinted. Precious salt cellars combine vermeil with hard stones. And above all, the colours are exquisite: pink shading into violet, shimmering blues, fiery reds.

Colour is one of the artist’s obsessions. Giberto defines himself as entirely Venetian. Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzagahas spent his whole life in the city often called the “City of the Doges,” Venice.

“In my earliest memories of Venice, the colours were different,” he says. “The city felt darker—more dramatic, a little worn, deeply romantic. Truly beautiful.”

He was not yet ten when his father died in 1971, leaving him the only male heir of a family whose name has shaped the history of northern Italy for centuries. The Valenti Gonzaga originated in Mantua. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Marquis Francesco II Gonzaga—husband of the celebrated Isabella d'Este—granted them the right to add the princely name Gonzaga to their own.

In the early nineteenth century, the last Valenti Gonzaga, Teresa, married Count Arrivabene, founding a new lineage: the Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga. In 1902, their great-grandson—also named Giberto—married Vera Papadopoli Aldobrandini, and the family settled permanently in Venice.

At the time, the city was entering a new golden age. It had become one of the capitals of Romanticism, and tourists were beginning to flock there. Palazzo Papadopoli became a centre of social life where the whole of Venetian high society gathered.

In 1948, Count Leonardo Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga married Maria delle Grazie Brandolini d’Adda. They had three children—two daughters and a son, Giberto.

“From my mother,” he says, “I inherited my sense of aesthetics.”

That sensibility was shaped within the family home. Although Palazzo Papadopoli dates back to the sixteenth century, the ceilings of the noble floor were painted in the early eighteenth century by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and his father Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The residence is almost a summary of three centuries of Venetian artistic life. For Giberto and his sisters, it became an education in taste.

Yet time, water and age have threatened this masterpiece.

It would have been easy to give in to nostalgia. Instead, the Venetian instinct for reinvention prevailed. In the early 2000s the luxury hotel group Aman Resorts wanted to open a property in Venice. An agreement was reached: the count, his wife Bianca di Savoia-Aosta, and their five children would keep the top floor, while the rest of the palazzo would be leased to the hotel. In 2013 the magnificent Aman Venice opened its doors.

With the future of his ancestral home secured, Giberto turned to another passion: the quintessential Venetian craft of glassmaking.

For years he has travelled regularly to Murano, where glass has been made for centuries. On this island in the lagoon—where Venetian authorities moved the furnaces a thousand years ago to prevent fires—master glassmakers practise the ancient art of fire, shaping both transparency and colour at once.

Giberto combines their expertise with his own aesthetic vision. The opening of his boutique by the Rialto Bridge marks a new chapter in his artistic journey—one that echoes Venice’s historic traditions of trade and maritime exchange.

At peak times, tourism professionals estimate that as many as 100,000 people cross the world’s most famous bridge each day. And for the past two weeks, they have been able to step inside a boutique already being called the most elegant in Venice: Giberto.