MURANO

So today, we set off by boat for Murano Island!! OK I admit, I’d never heard of Murano glass before last year but apparently a lot of women have- and my wife is one of them J. And Venice is of course, the home of Murano glass! And then if you really want to specific, Murano Island within Venice is THE home of Murano glass! So we went! I actually really enjoyed it- I figured I’d enjoy it for Carol’s sake (since I made her look at 100,000 statues in Rome)- but I actually found a lot of the glass stuff to be quite beautiful myself- it goes waaaaay beyond the jewelry. The chandeliers caught my eye the most- it would just be incredible to have a house large enough and grand enough to have a different one of these pieces in each room wouldn’t it. The island itself is just off shore of Venice but there are so many “things” in the water between boats, yachts, cruise ships, buoys, little islands- that it took us about 30-40 minutes to get over there. Plus you have to snake around the whole outside of Venice itself- Here we were going for about ½ an hour and I looked and we were just on the other side of Venice. I could tell from seeing the huge campanile from St. Mark’s church in San Marco Square (the famous square with all the pigeons). I J K These pictures show San Marco (St. Mark’s) Square as we were leaving it- and then they show Murano Island as we’re pulling into it- (the white/black light house)- and the other shot of the buildings- a lot of those buildings are actually glass furnaces/factories that are firing up hot furnaces to melt the glass and get it ready for the blowers.

The whole glass blowing thing years and years (I mean hundreds) ago was required to be put on this separate island to keep it away from Venice because of the danger of fire. For those of you who love glass jewelry like Carol--- you would have been in heaven on this island. Shop after shop after shop after shop of places – each of them with some very unique pieces and not just all the junk that is shipped over to all the tourist places in so many places like Venice, Rome, etc.. And REALLY reasonable- And by reasonable I mean that if something would sell for $20 in the US you might get it for $10 here- or bowls that might be $1,000 in the US for $300 here. Obviously isn’t back too many bowls J.