Venice

The first stop was the Baptistery of Neon, built towards the end of the 5^th century C.E.  Appropriately, this scene in the dome is John the Baptist baptizing Jesus.

This and the next photo are from the studio of Lucio Bubacco.  He’s another flameworker, one of the best in the world.  This is a chandelier – think about how much work there is to produce something this big with this much detail.

This sequence picks up after the preliminary parts were done.  The first thing they did was dip the pipe you see here into a furnace that was filled with molten clear glass to pick up the glass on the pipe in what’s called a gather.  They blew a bubble through the pipe, shaped the glass into cylinder, and cooled it somewhat.  (You can tell how hot glass is by the color – bright orange is really hot, and it gets closer to its real color as it cools.)  Meanwhile, the little disks you see were laid out on a metal table and heated with a blow torch, because cold glass touching hot glass is a recipe for disaster.  When the gather was shaped properly and cool enough, and the disks were hot enough, Salvadore rolled the cylinder on top of the disks, and they stuck to the cylinder.

Welcome to Venice!  You arrive by boat or, in our case, by plane then car then boat.  We started the trip on Murano, and then moved to Venice proper later.  So the first slides are from Murano.