Review: the Venezianico Redentore Bellanotte

I’ve never been to Venice, so I’m ill equipped to comment on how accurate the representation of St. Mark’s Square is on the dial of the new Venezianico Redentore Bellanotte, perhaps the brand’s most ambitious watch to date. What I am prepared to say, however, is that the new watch is impressive, charming, and full of little surprising details. And while it’s ultimately not a watch I’d personally wear day to day, it’s full of individual elements that I really love, and I’ve come away from it genuinely impressed at what Venezianico is capable of producing at what frankly feels like a made up price point. The fact that this watch comes in at under $1,000 is honestly kind of insane. 

Let’s back up a bit, though, because Venezianico is a brand that’s still new enough and small enough that they might require an old-fashioned introduction before we get to the watch at hand. As you may have guessed, Venezianico is an Italian brand, founded by brothers Alberto and Alessandro Morelli in 2017. They have a varied collection that includes watches across sport and dress categories, but they’re tied together by design elements inspired by the city of Venice, filtered through a modern design sensibility with little touches of classicism thrown in. The brand prides itself on its engineering acumen and has experimented quite liberally with materials, finding interesting uses for forged carbon, tungsten, mother-of-pearl, and aventurine in watches where you wouldn’t normally find them. But there are little Renaissance touches everywhere – the brand’s logo, for instance, is the cross found in the historic clock tower at St. Mark’s Square.

While the Italian watch community, particularly Italian dealers of vintage watches, have had an outsized impact on watch culture over the last several decades, Italy does not have a robust watchmaking history. So Venezianico’s stated goal of using their country and their city as inspiration gives them a lot of freedom to make watches that are not necessarily bogged down by any particular tradition. Their watches can give you a faint whiff of Italian flair and style that’s hard to describe, or they can be hyper-specific. That latter category is where the Redentore Bellanotte finds itself.