The story of the Stucky family reads like a novel. Swiss millers who became the wealthiest of Venetians, the Stuckys were indeed players in a typical 19th-century success story. This extraordinary industrial saga is intertwined with the history of the City of the Doges, whose staunch defenders the Stuckys were. Yet this tale—marked by death and downfall—is, in many ways, the most Shakespearean of tragedies.

The Stucky story is also a historical record. From artisans and minor rural notables to great fortunes of Venice, the Stuckys moved through all social strata of their time. Their saga offers a prism through which we can glimpse part of the 19th and 20th centuries’ history.

Exceptional archives, hundreds of photographs, and especially amateur 15mm films shot from 1900 onwards by Gianfranco Stucky using a Pocket Chrono—the very first consumer camera from Gaumont!