Murano - Island of Glass

Beyond my kitchen window and left of the cemetery island of St Michele - where the good and the not so good crowd together forever - lies Murano - the glass island.

Murano glass, Venetian glass was a thing I couldn't abide when I was little. Fussy glass ladies in frilly blue glass dresses being paid court to by some guy in a glass three corner hat. Glass cats chasing glass fish etc  It was such a "nanna" thing! However the island itself despite  all my preconceptions (and the tourist traffic) is lovely on a lovely day.

Which is what I had  and once I had caught the ferry from the stop outside my window  within 20 minutes I was pulling up to one of the vaporetto stops on the main thoroughfare of the island.

A welcoming committee had assembled to greet me

 I warmed to them immediately - they made me look good!

Now glassblowers had been ordered to the island centuries ago (not that any of them I met seemed to be quite that old) to prevent the risk of them burning Venice down  and razing it to the  lagoon. But Murano had a history predating the making of glass - it had been a fishing community of ancient foundation.

The principal church on the island is St Donato and it is  byzantine (though much modified).

The church itself has a magnificent Byzantine mosaic of the virgin behind the aspe. Sombre, reserved, dark eyed, she floats on a sea of gold the age of eternity. The nearest other such mosaics are located  in Ravenna, burial place of Dante and the home of one of Italy's great treasures: The basilica of San Vitale.

Behind the aspe, on the exterior wall I found a vespiary.   I kept my distance!

And here is one of the architectural decorations - a frieze of the cross and two trees.  Perhaps signifying that the cross is the tree of life.

Despite my youthful set against the output of the place I grew rather fond of the glasswork being  produced here as I walked down the main street again (this time looking for lunch). They're obviously taking a hit from Chinese artistic glass production - most of the shops have signs explaining the remarkable prices being charged as being due to the fact that they are locally produced and proudly "not Chinese". Needless to say there was so much choice I couldn't work what I should buy as a souvenir: a plum red glass chandelier perhaps - very modern, or a penguin with a fish in his tummy?

I didn't buy any lunch in the end so I launched of down a side street and found through an open door the business end of the glass making industry in progress. The glass is melted in small crucibles nowdays but it still takes hours to heat to 1200 C.

Elsewhere on the island, as everywhere else in Venice when there's serious work to be done there are always busy men and boats involved in it.

Or busy men with big concrete mixers floating on big barges -  The small boy in me delights in this!  Big things on big boats doing big things.

  

Having had my fix of big machines I found the glass museum and had a look in there. It's fascinating. They have ancient glass from necropolises in Croatia and sites in the Veneto - nobody knows exactly when the Venetian's took up the art and craft of glass making. My grandfather on my father's side was a glass maker at ACI in Spotswood around the turn of the 20th century - they only made commercial glass: bottles and jars - not fine art glass but it was very interesting to see all of the implements of the glass makers art on display. I was only a little disappointed that they didn't have a live display of the craft and art.

I had class in the late afternoon so I had to put on my ten league boots (waterproof of course) and head back to school. I did notice along the way a little girl aged 11 or so, so very American and so very grown up looking in her travelling gear. The only give-away about her age really was the doll sticking out of the back of  her pack

As I walked back to the vaporetto stop  I came across a glass shrine to the Virgin at the corner of two roads

There's so much cultural continuity with the ancient here. The Greeks and Romans also put up shrines or markers to the gods at boundaries and corners.

Along  the way back to the ferry stop I also came across a series of remarkable large scale glass sculptures. Here one of them, whose title (Italian always sounds so flowery when translated into English) is: "The birth of light in a blue comet of glass"

And so to the bus-stop with its impressive lighthouse

Despite its vocation ( of turning sand into gold) or perhaps because of it  Murano remains firmly Venetian. The lion of St Mark still flies proudly over it