About Watermarked
The name of this newsletter is inspired by Watermark, Iosif Brodskij’s essay on Venice. Here, the city is described in all its wintry, silent, luminous beauty. The beautiful prose also succeeds in encapsulating a feeling––a sense of overwhelm towards a place at once fragile and eternal, beautiful and troubled––that felt immediately familiar.
Venice is now my home, and much about what I experience, and therefore care to write about, is bound to it.
Readers who have been following my work for a while know that for years I have been focusing on food and travel. These two topics often act as vehicles for exploring stories about culture, people, places. In the end, what I’ve always wanted to write about is life.
Watermarked is my gateway to a more free, digressing, even rambling form of writing and sharing. It incorporates personal narrative, snippets of daily life, and deep dives into things that matter to me. Reading it will hopefully feel like taking a walk with me through the maze-like streets of Venice, talking about this and that––life, experiences, musings––exchanging tips and discoveries, trips and epiphanies.
Thank you for reading, and welcome.
Who is writing?
Hi! I am Valeria Necchio, writer, photographer and author based in Venice, Italy.
I grew up in a village in the Venetian countryside from which I couldn’t wait to run away. With a degree in cultural studies, a penchant for good writing and an interest in food-related stories, I moved to London in 2012 to work in communications and marketing for the hospitality industry. I left in 2017 and, after a short stint in Sydney, I returned to Italy at the start of 2019. The initial counter-culture shock hit me hard. For a long time, I felt lost. Until in 2021, I moved to Venice and things began to fall into place. I’ll save the story of why and how that came to be for another time.
From 2011 to 2019, I wrote a blog, Life Love Food, which gave me the chance to write my way through change, new flavours, a growing relationship. It also enabled me to put my writing out there and eventually led me to write for publications such as Monocle, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera. In hindsight, the blog was the place where my writing felt the most free and true. After the decline of the blogging era and the ascent of Instagram, I decided to close it. I struggled to find a place where I could share so freely ever since.
In 2017, Faber published my first book, Veneto, a cookbook-slash-memoir on the food of my origins. I often say that everything I know about cooking ended up in this first book. This is not entirely true, although Veneto does contain most of the recipes that meant something to me up until then. What it also contains is one’s life story. I have learned to write about food as a doorway to past and recent memories, and Veneto is a holder of memories from my first thirty years of life.
Perhaps this is why, in the years that followed its publication, I have halted most of my recipe-development projects and columns. My heart was not longer in it. I wanted to focus on personal narrative and free myself from the prescriptive aspects of domestic writing. Also, I didn’t want to be known as a recipe developer anymore, because I am not. I am a home cook who loves fishing from a basket of reassuring flavours and throwing things together out of sheer intuition; a solo cook who often makes the same thing over and over again. With this in mind, I want my food writing to read more like an unconstrained series of sensations––words that unlock flavour memories, as if you’re sitting in the kitchen with someone who’s telling you a story while stirring a risotto: You won’t know exactly what’s going in the pot, because that’s not the point. The point is the story. It always is.
Today, I make a living consulting and working in communication for a variety of projects related to the experience of Venice and the lagoon. I write essays for Italy Segreta and interviews for Inside Venice. And then, I write for myself and for you here.
For visual snippets of daily life, you can find me on Instagram.
Why Subscribe?
As a free subscriber, you will receive Watermarked directly to your inbox once a month. (If you first want to see if what I write is up your alley, you can take a look at the archives.)
Watermarked is free for everyone at this stage. This might change in the future as I turn it into a more frequent publication and (hopefully) a richer conversation. In a world filled with algorithm-driven content, newsletters have become the place where meaningful, creative writing can still happen and where writers and readers can truly connect. Supporting writers you enjoy means enabling them to show up in a way that feels sustainable while doing the kind of writing you like to read.
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