Cristina Giussani is a bookseller and owner of the Nautical Bookshop Mare di Carta and its publishing house. Giussani has always loved and frequented the sea, both through sailing and books. He has been reading, since he was a teenager, the great sea classics, Conrad and Melville of course, but especially Joshua Slocum, Bernard Moitessier, Alain Colas, Eric Tabarly, true inspirational muses of many modern-day sailors. Since 1997 he has combined passion and professionalism by opening a bookstore entirely dedicated to the sea, in a city that without water would never have existed, Venice. The Mare di Carta bookshop, the only bookshop dedicated to the sea in Venice and one of the few so specialized in Italy, is also a place to meet authors or to have cultural and technical exchanges, a place where a lot of information is collected and redistributed, about navigation, new laws, regattas, sailing schools and of course publishing.

Hamed Ahmadi is an Afghan restaurateur, now a Venetian for many years, and owner of 5 venues in the Veneto region, including Orient Experience and Africa Experience in Cannaregio and Dorsoduro. He arrived in Venice in 2005 at the age of 25, to present the film Maama, Buddha, the girl and the water at the Venice Film Festival, obtaining refugee status after receiving threats for his film work. He later worked as a cultural and linguistic mediator for the Municipality of Venice in Tessera, before founding Orient Experience in 2012. Over the years, his restaurants have employed many refugees, helping them to build a life in Venice. Together, they have composed a menu that collects recipes inspired by their travels, connecting Afghanistan to Italy via Iran, Turkey and Greece.

Francesca Tarocco is a cultural historian, a writer and critic, and an associate professor at New York University Shanghai and University Ca' Foscari of Venice. She is the co- founder and director of the international research initiative Shanghai Studies Society, an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhist Studies, and a board member of Venice Center for the Humanities and Social Change. She has published, among other topics, on Shanghai, media and visual culture, materiality, and religion. Her current book projects include a cultural history of technology in modern China and a book on Shanghai and water. Francesca is a frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues and art magazines including Frieze, Flash Art International, Parkett, among others.