Cadore, Italy
The workshop
An alpine valley north of Venice has made eyewear for a hundred years. Most of the frames you have ever worn — luxury or otherwise — were made within forty kilometres of here. Lumen is one workshop, fifty kilometres up the valley from the largest. We make twenty frames, fifty at a time.
<p>The first acetate frames came out of Cadore in the 1880s, when the engineering schools of the Veneto figured out how to bend cellulose nitrate into rims that did not crack. The town of Calalzo, twenty kilometres north of Cortina, opened its first workshop in 1879. By the late 60s there were two hundred of them in the valley, employing nine thousand people, and ninety per cent of every premium frame sold in Europe was being made here.</p><p>Most of them are gone now, consolidated into the two enormous holding companies that own most of what is on opticians shelves today. The patterns those workshops drew — round Italian frames for civil servants, cat-eyes for Florentine schoolteachers, severe rectangulars for the French civil service — are sitting in cardboard boxes in lofts, in the houses of the children of the people who made them.</p><p>Lumen was started in 2022 by Caterina Vianello and Marco Beretta. Caterina spent eleven years at one of the big two, the last four of those running their archival division. Marco was a pattern-maker who left to do furniture, and came back. We bought the disused premises of a workshop that had closed in 2018, retooled it for small runs, and started writing letters to the families of the founders of the houses we wanted to revive.</p><p>Today there are five of us. We make twenty frames in runs of fifty to two hundred per colourway, and we make them in our workshop, which is on the ground floor of a building on Via Belluno that used to be a tobacconist. We do not have a marketing budget. The website is the marketing. The frames are the marketing. The fact that we put our own names on the inside of the temple is the marketing.</p>
From the workshop principal
“We are not a brand. We are a workshop with a list of telephone numbers — the families of the people who used to make these patterns, the opticians who stocked them, and the customers who keep coming back to be measured. The brand is the side effect.”
Caterina Vianello · Workshop principal