Roberta's Blog: Murano Glassmaking Tour on a Shoestring

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Murano Glassmaking Tour on a Shoestring

Perhaps you have heard that Venice is expensive. It is... and it isn't... More on that in another post, but here's a good example of what you can do on the cheap in Venice and still have an amazing experience: a self-guided Murano glassmaking tour.

Setting out to Murano is as easy as jumping on the vaparetto - and if you are in Venice for a few days then you probably already have a vaparetto pass; if not, tickets are cheap and you'll be using a few everyday anyways. So I consider the transportation segment "free".

Once on the island, you can find a glassmaking demonstration for as little as 5E. As I was getting off my vaparetto (at the first stop on Murano), there was a guy pointing the way to demos, less than 5 minutes walk away - I listened and paid attention to the details so that I could come back after lunch. But to the experience itself. I walked in, paid my 5E, they waited a few minutes longer for others to arrive and then the demonstration started. Exciting to be there, right in the workshop, next to the truly red hot furnace. There were only two other people there so I was able to get very close. Here are the glassmakers getting started...

Just before they got started, they noticed that one of the stones in their oven broken. The solution? Weld it together with a blob of hot glass!

Now, here is our blob of hot glass...

I had my camera on the glass-end of the process, but they guy would have been blowing down the tube you see while he rolled the rod around and the blog began to change shape...

He would put the glass back in the oven every few minutes before continuing on. At this point, there was another guy with another blob of glass in a different colour holding his stick next to the main guy. Here you see the main guy using tools to manipulate the second piece of liquid glass as it was twisted around the original piece...

Shaping the glass with scissors, hard to tell what is happening, but very interesting... They did have an audio recording playing during the demo, in English, explaining the overall process, the heat of the ovens, etc.

I literally gasped out loud as I recognized the horse that he was making...

Creating the legs...

And the finished product!!! Took all of 5-10 minutes to create. We had a quick minute to take pictures then this horsie was heading to a cool-down furnace for 24 hours.

They shepard you into the glass shop after the demo - with incredible stuff costing hundreds and even thousands of dollars - but all I bought was 2 little pieces of glass (a paper weight and a butter knife) for 10E each.. They didn't make their millions on me, obviously! Walking back to the vaparetto I spotted this gate at another glassmaking establishment and snapped a couple pics...

Another closeup of the gate....

Now, for a few other pics from my time on Murano... This is one of the glass places:

And another... this sign was made out of little chips of coloured glass:

This canal was the other way from the glassmaking demo and it's where I went first for a bit to eat and to soak in the ambience....

Oh, on the way to Murano, the first stop you come to is this one. Don't get off here, unless you have a hankering for seeing some crypts and graves...

These were some pilons that had seen better days that I spotted on the journey... I think they were just for directional purposes (once you get out on the water to/from Murano you can clearly see that they have "lanes" for the waterways)...

While I was at lunch, I observed this activity taking place on the canal across from me. The boat had a big winch (from which the operator made a point to look cool and grin once he spotted me taking pics, lol) and they were lifting heavy stuff out... Once they get these materials out of the boat, they will put them on top of that rickety old wheel barrow and all they guys would help push it along to a nearby building. It was rather hilarious as I was wondering if they wheel barrow would survive...