Caffè Florian opened its doors in Venice's Piazza San Marco in 1720 and quickly became a favorite rendezvous of Europe's artists, politicians and well-heeled Grand Tourists. It was in one of the Florian's plush salons that plans were first outlined for the Venice Biennale, which debuted in 1895. With the passing of time, the storied cafe drew bigger crowds while growing culturally marginal in the process. To recover some of its luster, the Florian in 1988 launched "Temporanea," a program that invites artists to install new works amid the velvet divans and gilded boiseries of the daintily scaled interior.

The low-profile but determined initiative is the brainchild of Florian president Daniela Vedaldi, who is assisted by artist-curator Stefano Stipitivich and the journalist Roberta Nardi. Beginning with Bruno Ceccobelli, the Florian has also featured Mimmo Rotella, Gaetano Pesce, Arcangelo, Luca Buvoli, Fabrizio Plessi. Fausto Gilberti and Austria's Irene Andessner. The "Temporanea" projects, all of which are acquired by the Florian and displayed at the time of the visual arts Biennale, are now bracketed in the intervening months by a less formal exhibition program. The first North Americans, Canada's Royal Art Lodge, arrived in 2005. Through Nov. 19 the cafe is hosting a mixed-medium installation by its first U.S. invitee, Miami-born and New York-based Judi Harvest.

The intrepid Harvest was already known in Venice as the author of two monumental outdoor sculptures that were prominently positioned at the vaporetto stop near Harry's Bar during the last two biennials: Fragmented Peace (2003), an 87-inch-high seated Buddha comprising a stainless-steel wire exoskeleton filled with pieces of multicolored Murano glass, and Full Moon (2005), a 7-foot-diameter spherical cage whose 28 segments, filled with 2,070 smaller glass orbs, are sequentially illuminated to recap the lunar cycle every 5 minutes. Still looking skyward, Harvest centered the Florian installation, called Venetian Satellite, on a suspended replica of Telstar (the first communications satellite, launched in 1962), which tucked neatly into the 12-sided vault of the cafe's entrance ceiling. Forty-eight handmade panels of Murano glass cover the steel armature, an array of electronically sequenced colored lights illuminates the interior, and an LED readout, belted around the satellite's middle, proclaims in five languages, "WELCOME YOU ARE HERE COMMUNICATE."

Resolutely playful, Venetian Satellite nevertheless offers food for thought. A retro symbol of the dawn of high-tech remote communication materializes to endorse face-to-face contact in a nostalgia-laden temple to the art of conversation. The installation was fleshed out with 18 tabletop Murano glass Martians—visitors to Venice from another canal-laced environment—and three tondi bearing computer-generated diagrams of the satellite's armature that look as though they might have been discovered among the pages of Leonardo's notebooks. Under the glass tabletops in two of the salons, Harvest inserted collages on linen that combine reproductions of Olympian dieties and other celestial beings from Tiepolo paintings, pictures of astronauts in full space gear, newpaper headlines trumpeting moon launches, and candy wrappers from Baci (Italian for "kisses") and Mars bars—confectionary allusions to the gods of love and war.

In February or March 2007, the Florian will announce the "Temporanea" artist for Biennale-time in June. A smaller version of Venetian Satellite opens Nov. 11 to initiate the contemporary art program at the Florian's recently opened Florence venue. With a new Florian in Abu Dhabi and additional cafes planned in Europe and Asia, it's likely that the Florian's patronage, briefly interplanetary, will become effectively global.

—Marcia E. Vetrocq