Art and architecture : Laboratorio Morseletto since 1920

This research illustrates the history of the Laboratorio Morseletto. Active since 1920, owned by the same family for three generations, it produces all kinds of objects, coatings, finishes and furnishings in marble and stone, in the creation of the most varied floors and surfaces worked in Venetian style, walls in marmorino and smoothed stucco. Its history begins around 1920 in Vicenza. Pietro Morseletto, first a pupil at the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza and later at the Brera Academy, a gifted sculptor as well as an antiquarian and entrepreneur, soon demonstrated his ability to work Vicenza stone in the workshop he set up. A significant turning point in Pietro’s life and in the history of his workshop came in about 1930, when he was commissioned by Pierre Du Pont to create “furnishings”, fountains, water features and sculptures for Longwood Gardens, a botanical garden covering 436 hectares in the Brandywine Creek Valley in Pennsylvania inspired by Tuscan villas. Thanks to this, Pietro was able to expand his business and buy new Vicenza stone quarries still used today for the needs of the business. After Pietro’s death (1974) management passed to his sons, Paolo and Leonardo. Since the nineties, Deborah and Barbara have been working alongside their father Paolo at the company’s helm. The work performed by the Laboratorio Morseletto includes projects for the restoration of historic buildings ranging from La Scala Opera House in Milan and the Teatro Comunale in Bologna to the Basilica Palladiana, Villa La Rotonda in Vicenza, Palazzo Te in Mantua and Villa Manin at Passariano. The quality of the stonework it performs is shown by the production of various sepulchral monuments, from the tomb of Alvar Aalto in Helsinki to those designed by Arata Isozaki for Luigi Nono in Venice and by Carlo Scarpa for the Galli family at Nervi (Genoa), and the burials in the monumental Brion tomb at San Vito di Altivole (Treviso) also by Scarpa. In 1973, in collaboration with Paolo Marzotto’s Industria dei Marmi Vicentini, the firm created the large sculpture Bagni misteriosi by Giorgio De Chirico in the park of the Palazzo della Triennale in Milan. Since 1945 the Laboratorio Morseletto has worked with countless designers and architectural firms, including BBPR, Pietro Porcinai, Mario Botta, Matteo Thun, Vittorio Gregotti, Pierluigi Cerri, Cini Boeri, Ettore Sottsass, Frank O. Gehry, David Chipperfield, Álvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura. Equally significant are the sculptural works it created for Roberto Burle Marx, Miguel Berrocal, Jacob Hashimoto, Ettore Spalletti and Krishnaraj Chonat. The Laboratorio Morseletto’s many clients include the Riva family (park of Villa Fiorita in Saronno), the Invernizzi family (an estate at Trenzanesio near Milan) and the Brion family, as well as some of the most famous fashion houses, for which it has created sales and representational spaces around the world.