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In 1739 the Council of Ten, the powerful court of the Venetian Republic, received a peculiar request from a glass blower from Murano. It was well known that those ten judges would face important [...]

Almost 30 years ago, in 1988, the Società Veneziana delle Conterie e Cristallerie (the Venetian company of Glass beads and Crystal) stopped its activity. Recently its abandoned space was [...]

While everybody knows that Murano glass is synonym for luxury, are we all aware that it could even be used as money? We are not talking about vases, chandeliers, mirrors or goblets though. We are [...]

Foulard, I love this word and its sound. When I was a child, my mum kept her foulards in her bedroom, carefully folded in the fancy rococo chest of drawers. There was one of them that I cannot [...]

Not too far from Giovanna Zanella’s shoe workshop there’s a nicely named bridge: the bridge of the “bareteri” to recall when in its sorroundings the “barete” [...]

One day, while preaching in Egypt, the patron of Venice St Mark had quite a major problem if you need to walk: the strap of his shoe fell off. He then met a cobbler and asked him if he could [...]

Carnival ended a week ago. Even this year I met enthusiastic visitors, some for the first time in Venice during these days, from Europe, Asia and America. Figures talk about 80,000 tourists in st [...]

I do not recall the first time I entered Saverio’s’ workshop of rowlocks, maybe because it felt very familiar, as if I had always known that place. But maybe it was also the smell of the [...]