A pastry shop with hexagonal floor tiles

Ravenna is a city where history, art and culture unfold at every street corner. The Western Roman Empire, the Ostrogoths led by Theodoric the Great and the Byzantines with the Eastern Roman Empire all left their mark over the centuries. Historical legacies abound. Via Salara where the pastry shop in question is located corresponds to the ancient decumanus, the term used by the Romans to refer to the most important east-to-west oriented road whenever they built a new settlement. Bar Pasticceria La Veneziana dates back to 1864, when it was opened in Via Salara 15 by the first Venetian owners. In 1964, exactly a hundred years later, the business was taken over by Ermanno Baccarini and subsequently his son Ivan, who still runs it today. The pastry kitchen produces sweets and cakes for every occasion, small pastries, puff pastries for refreshments and buffets, semifreddi, biscuits, chocolates and a vast selection of savoury pastries and much more. The shop has two large street-view windows. In 2016 the owner decided to embark on a complete restyling project, which was completed in 2017. «La Veneziana was previously a very classic location with solid wood furnishings made by a skilled craftsman in a predominantly Venetian baroque style,» said Mino Torelli, the architect commissioned to undertake the new interior design project. «Although dated, the furnishings had a certain appeal thanks to the manual skill of the original craftsman. With this in mind, we decided to restore and keep one item, the wood lion inlay panel that now hangs on the wall behind the counter.» The building itself was left substantially unchanged. The walls were repaired, the wooden false ceiling was replaced with a plasterboard solution and everything was redecorated. The shop windows were replaced and the exterior repainted. The most significant remodelling work involved the demolition and replacement of the floor covering. «When designing the new floor, we kept in mind the fact that Ravenna is home to the world’s largest collection of ancient mosaics and that even today many buildings continue to have mosaic floors. So we looked for materials that would reflect these historic shapes and decorations. We found them in the Fioranese Heritage Exagona porcelain tiles, which we installed to splendid effect in a mixture of colours and decorations based on a meticulously designed layout. The selection we used ranged from the Exagona version in colours Grey, Ivory and Beige to the Heritage Deco Exagona version with five available patterns.» At this point it was necessary to determine the layout. «We decided to transform the layout completely because in this kind of shop the floor plan and counter have an important sales function, serving to project a visual image of the products from the window and to convey the shop’s business philosophy. And it must also be functional.» All that remained was to choose the overall design of the furnishings, which Torelli envisages as a kind of garment that is worn to create a pleasant ambience. «Given the visually striking floor with its references to the historical context, we opted for monochromatic furnishings with the dual effect of accentuating the floor and highlighting the products on the counter. This was further enhanced by the effective lighting design.»