In depth
Glass glossary
The words of glass art explained simply: the techniques you will encounter when visiting glass museums, from the ancient ones to those born in Murano and still alive today.
Glassblowing
The technique that revolutionised the history of glass: a hollow iron pipe with which the master gathers molten glass and inflates it into a bubble, shaping it with tools and rotating movements. It was invented on the Syro-Palestinian coast in the 1st century BC and spread rapidly across the Roman Empire.
Mould-blowing
The glass bubble is blown inside a mould that determines its shape and relief decoration. The Romans already used it to mass-produce signed cups: like those by the master Ennion kept at the Adria Museum.
Murrina
A slice of polychrome glass cane whose design — a flower, a star, a portrait — runs through its whole thickness. Murrine, set side by side and fused, compose vessels and plaques. The term is nineteenth-century, but the technique is ancient: Roman murrine glass can be admired at the Altino Museum.
Millefiori
The most famous murrine pattern: many small flower-shaped slices set side by side to form a continuous surface, like a flowering meadow frozen in glass. An ancient technique revived with great success by nineteenth-century Murano masters.
Filigree
Fine threads of lattimo glass embedded in clear glass to form regular, elegant patterns. Born in Murano in the early sixteenth century, it is one of the techniques that made Venetian glass famous: filigree masterpieces are on display at the Murano Glass Museum.
Reticello
The most virtuosic variant of filigree: two sets of threads wound in opposite directions cross to form a net, and a tiny air bubble — all of identical size — is trapped in each mesh. A test bench for the master's hand.
Zanfirico
A filigree cane made of multicoloured threads twisted into a spiral, then used to compose the object. The name comes from Antonio Sanquirico, the nineteenth-century art dealer who brought these Murano virtuosities back to the market.
Lattimo
Milk-white opaque glass, obtained with tin compounds. Created in Murano in the fifteenth century to imitate Chinese porcelain, it became the ideal ground for enamel-painted decoration.
Aventurine
Glass strewn with microscopic copper crystals that sparkle like gold dust. The melt succeeded so unpredictably that it came out only "a ventura" — by luck: hence the name, later passed on to the stone that resembles it.
Sommerso
Layers of differently coloured glass cased ("submerged") one inside the other, creating overlapping transparent thicknesses. A signature technique of twentieth-century Murano design, established in the 1930s and much loved after the war.
Incalmo
The hot grafting of two blown glass bubbles of different colours: joined rim to rim while still incandescent, they produce an object with sharply separated bands of colour. One of the most difficult feats of Venetian glassblowing.
Glass paste
Opaque, intensely coloured glass, often worked cold as well, used since antiquity for jewellery, amulets, mosaic tesserae and small sculpture.
Cameo glass
Two or more superimposed layers of glass — typically white over blue — carved cold like a hardstone, bringing out the design in relief. The absolute masterpiece is the Blue Vase of Pompeii; cameo glass is also on display in Aquileia.
Conterie
The tiny Venetian glass beads, produced for centuries in Murano and strung by the "impiraresse". The art of glass beads has been UNESCO intangible cultural heritage since 2020.
Enamels
Opaque coloured glass, ground and applied with a brush to decorate cups and bottles by firing, or cut into tesserae for mosaics: Venetian enamels have clad apses and domes all around the Mediterranean.
Crystal
Lead glass with at least 24% lead oxide: heavier, more brilliant and with a characteristic ring when struck. Italy's capital is Colle di Val d'Elsa, where about 95% of the national production is made: the story is told at the Crystal Museum.
Venetian cristallo
The perfectly colourless, transparent soda glass perfected in Murano by Angelo Barovier in the mid-fifteenth century: so pure that it earned comparison with rock crystal, it conquered the courts of all Europe.
Bohemian crystal
A hard, limpid potash-lime glass, perfect for cutting and engraving, typical of central Europe. In Italy it was produced by the Bohemian craftsmen of the old Carisolo glassworks, in the Dolomites.
Empoli green glass
The Tuscan blown glass with a typical green colour, due to the iron oxide naturally present in local sands. It made flasks, demijohns and everyday glassware famous: its story is at the MUVE in Empoli.
Glass cutting
Cold-working glass with abrasive wheels: it serves to facet, engrave and polish. It is the technique that brings out the best in crystal, making its edges sparkle like a prism.
Frit
The vitrifiable mixture — silica sand and fluxes — given a first firing and then ground, ready for final melting in the furnace. In pre-industrial furnaces it was the first, delicate step of production.
Stained glass
A composition of cut coloured glass pieces, painted with grisaille and joined by lead cames: the art that illuminated cathedrals and palaces, from the Middle Ages to Art Nouveau.