On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions. From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
This series was created by Alain Chamot (1971-2020).
We’ll be in Venice for a couple of weeks. Enjoy!
randy khan
My wife and I went on a glass trip to Venice in 2015. (I guess I’ll find out soon enough if any of the other people on the trip are fellow jackals.) Venice, particularly the island of Murano, has a centuries-long history of glassmaking, and there are lots of fabulous artists there today as well. There will be a fair amount of glass, but except for one day I promise other things as well, including two excursions outside of Venice that were real highlights of the trip.
Welcome to Venice! You arrive by boat or, in our case, by plane then car then boat. We started the trip on Murano, and then moved to Venice proper later. So the first slides are from Murano.
This is just a nice entrance to one of the glassmaking studios.
A good rule of thumb is that, except for the famous glassmaking houses like Venini, most of the good work on Murano is tucked away in studios in nondescript buildings or up the stairs on the second floor. This is some pretty nice glass jewelry, from a studio with no obvious markings outside. Luckily, the people who organized the trip knew where to look.
There are more than 400 bridges in Venice (although I’m not sure whether that count is just the main island or everywhere. The canals are the streets of the city, and they let you get from one side to another without swimming (and as a general rule you wouldn’t want to swim in the canals). Some are really lovely, some are just functional. This one is sort of in between.
A lovely mosaic on the side of a building in Murano.
This is a glass bug inside the showroom/studio of Cesare Toffolo. It was made by a process called flameworking. Flameworkers work sitting down at a torch, using glass rods and really simple tools – things like tweezers and picks – and their hands to manipulate the glass. It’s a really delicate and detailed process at the highest levels. Toffolo is a real master of this art. (I have a glass artist friend who would think she’d died and gone to heaven if she had one of his insects.)
There is almost no outdoor glass sculpture on Murano. This piece is by far the most prominent, kind of at the intersection of the two main canals and, more important, right in front of Da Lele, a glassblower hangout restaurant.
And here’s a good view of the facades of some houses on the Grand Canal in Venice, if memory serves me correctly. (There’s too much water for it to be Murano.) It’s kind of weird, at first, to see doors fronting on the water, but that’s the way things are because the canals really are the streets. This is not to say that there aren’t buildings that are built with their main facades on the land side – there are a lot, but particularly along the Grand Canal this is what you see.
Auntie Anne
OMG – a glass trip! I am so thrilled to get to experience this through you. That insect is incredible – the fine detail work blows me away. Tweezers and picks, right? Wow.
Xavier
My archaeologist buddy found a beautiful trade bead made in the 1400s in Venice or probably Murano when excavating an abandoned pueblo in New Mexico. Wish I had a picture!
CaseyL
These are wonderful photos! I do some glass art, and going to Murano would be like going to a shrine.
Are you familiar with the mystery writer Donna Leone? She wrote about 30 or so mysteries set in Venice. She also lived there for about 40 years. Excellent writer, and fascinating to read about Venice as a place people live and work (and murder one another).
Barbara
Nice pictures. We were last in Venice in 2017, and I am guessing Venice is one of those places where people feel like the pandemic has given them their city back a little. We had gone to Murano and Torcello in 1998 and last time we went to Burano, where they make lace. Going out of season is definitely better.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I joke that I’m going to be on the first plane to Europe as soon as the first country will let me in. Only kinda joking. Italy– Rome and Venice at the top of my itinerary– is a strong contender for my first trip.
Barbara
@CaseyL: The Aurelio Zen series has one book set in Venice, and Venice is the city where Zen is from. Each of the books is set in a different city or region of Italy, and the whole series becomes much darker over time, but the episode set in Venice highlights the slow death of Venice as a place to live, choked to death by tourism.
randy khan
@CaseyL:
My wife and I have listened to a bunch of those as audiobooks. We really enjoy them.
Lapassionara
These are wonderful. When we were in Venice, we went to Burano, to see the lace factories. But we did not see the glass factories, so these photographs are much appreciated.
Jacel
I went on a glass tour in Murano in 1980, during a two-week stretch when I was playing clarinet on the streets in Venice. If only that could have continued to be my life thereafter.
JanieM
Thanks for the vicarious adventures and enjoyment, randy khan. :-)
cope
Beautiful pictures. I have no crafting abilities but always fancied blowing glass might be something I could do. Alas, opportunities to try it other than with small glass tubes in science class have never presented themselves to me.
We went to Murano in the ’50s when I was a kid. One of the glassblowers there made a small dog piece in about two minutes. When it had cooled, he slipped it to my little sister in a very conspiratorial way that I always interpreted as meaning “Don’t tell my boss”. I believe she still has it. I’ll have to ask her about it.
The other cool thing I remember is that the admiral of the 7th Fleet passed us going in the opposite direction in a fancy motor launch while we were being gondolaed about. He saluted my little brother who was wearing the naval themed shirt that he never wanted to take off. He probably doesn’t remember that.
randy khan
@Barbara:
When we were there, we were told that there are only about 20,000 people in Venice itself. On any given day in season, I’d bet that there at least as many tourists there as locals. Our local guide didn’t even live there – she lived on the mainland.
JanieM
The mention of glass and tucked away places reminds me of a little adventure I once had in Boston, when a friend who made stained glass art took me with him to buy some glass. We went into a shabby, unmarked old house in a rundown neighborhood. The first floor was piled with old furniture, apparently in storage. We walked up to the second floor on a stair that turned 90 degrees halfway up. The room we entered had double-hung windows on three sides, with little rectangular stained glass samples lined up on both levels of each window. It was like walking into wonderland, or when The Wizard of Oz turns from b/w to color. Amazing — a vivid, treasured memory almost fifty years later.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I love Venice. I’ve been there a couple times, but we never made the time for a trip to Murano.
What you said about the little shops is kind of something I’ve found to be true everywhere. Venice is overrun with tourists, but it doesn’t take much effort to find the little shops on the side streets where the proprietor doesn’t speak any English, and those places tend to be the best memories of the trip.
CaseyL
@Barbara: Venice beseiged by tourism is also a theme in Leone’s later books, and the main reason she moved out of the city (to Switzerland, I think). It’s been sad, watching the city become a Tourism Theme Park in the course of the series.
Mary G
Love the beetle, and the glass jewelry.
Dan B
A glass artist from Murano came to Seattle decades ago. As did a RISD grad named Chihuly. There were glass artists already here because of the advantage of cool weather when working in front of furnaces. Chihuly was the most successful but probably not the best. The big blue sculpture seems influenced by Chihuly, a reverse pollination.
randy khan
@Dan B:
I don’t know if that piece was influenced by Chihuly (who actually did a Fulbright in Murano early in his career). I remember seeing it from a distance and wondering if it was his, then getting closer and realizing that it couldn’t possibly be (for many reasons, starting with the elements being too boring). There’s a lot of stuff out there that is vaguely Chihuly-like. One of the vaguely disappointing things as a glass collector is going to even relatively high-end craft shows and seeing people who are doing work that is more or less Chihuly knockoffs. Granted, they probably sell, but if you have the skill to make a knockoff you can make something original.
Fun fact about Chihuly: He actually grew up in Tacoma, so coming to Seattle was really a homecoming for him. (And it might not have happened if a couple of collectors hadn’t donated land for what became Pilchuck Glass School.)
sab
@CaseyL: Dorothy Dunnett also has her Niccolo doing business on Murano in one of her books.
There was a German tv adaptation of Donna Leone’s books that our local PBS station showed a couple of years ago. It was filmed in Venice but all the actors spoke German, playing Italian detectives. Interesting to see them moving around the city by boat and bridges.
Mary G
Got an appointment for my first vaccine shot at Disneyland Thursday afternoon!! It’ll probably be raining cats and dogs and I don’t care.
bjacques
I miss Venice. Living in a foreign-speaking land, me and bjacqueline get to visit there every few years. Sant’Elena, behind the Giardini Biennale, and other parts northeast are still quiet and like a neighborhood, even in peak season. If you don’t mind commuting, Mogliano Venetian, birthplace of Piranesi, is only 15 minutes away. Trevino, further along the line (towards Trieste), is also worth a day trip. We’ve never made it to Murano.
Laura Too
The pictures are wonderful and the conversations evoked by them are a delight! Thanks!
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Oh, yay, Mary G! Wonderful news!
Miss Bianca
@CaseyL: That’s happened to Florence, too, or so the Florentine woman I met in the police station there told me.
That was a memorable experience, the Florentine police station. We were there to report a theft from the youth hostel we were staying in. Wouldn’t have been so bad except we were on the train, moments away from steaming out to Vienna, when we discovered it.
Never did get to Vienna, alas.
Shana
What wonderful pictures and thanks so much for sharing them. I look forward to the rest of them. Venice is perhaps my favorite city in the world. We’re supposed to be doing a cruise next year that leaves from Haifa and ends in Venice (fingers crossed) so we can have a couple of days at least for the Venice Biennale afterward. It’s usually in odd numbered years but is rescheduled because of Covid.
Several years ago (2013?) we bought some beautiful pendants to hang over the island in our kitchen, or rather ordered them to be made and sent, during a visit to Murano. I wish I could take them with when we eventually sell the house to downsize.