The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

One of Venice’s glittering treasures has for centuries been the glass on its attendant island, Murano.

It’s surprisingly hard to gauge the rate at which time passes—whether it moves faster for others than it does for you.

It is 1486, the height of the Renaissance, and Venice is reveling in its position as the trade center of Europe and much of the rest of the world. It seems the City of Water will always be rich and powerful. Orsola Rosso is nine years old. She lives on Murano, but has not yet worked with glass…

Listening to him was like trying to walk through the ruins of a building, with uneven ground and potential holes and hidden rocks that might trip you up.

Now: time to skip aheadin time. You can do that with time alla Veneziana.

She looks up and it is no longer 1494, but 1574. Yet not much has changed for Orsola. In this magical place where time passes differently, she and those who are important to her have not grown any older. She is eighteen years old.

Another skip and it touches down in 1631. Time alla Veneziana in action once more. The plague has run its course, as plagues do, killing almost a third of the population of Venice.

She looks up. Fifty-six years have passed in the outside world, and another plague has just begun to subside, but she and those who matter to her are no older…

Stone skimming again. A long jump via time alla Veneziana, from 1633 to 1755.

She looks up. It is 122 years later. She and those who matter to her are eight years older. She is now twenty-nine, but she has no idea how old the one who matters most to her is.

The skimmed stone skips forty-two years now, touching down in 1797.

She looks up; she is now thirty-seven. She and those who matter to her are another eight years older. Their fate is linked to that of their nearby city. And Venice is suffering. We are going to skim through that suffering, expanding and contracting our way within those years so we don’t linger on them…

The stone skims across the water, landing in 1915, several months into the Great War. Orsola Rosso is turning back and forth in the flame a red bead in the shape of a drop of blood. She looks up, and seventy-one years have passed since the Austrians began that bridge. She and those who matter to her are four years older. Orsola is forty-four.

ubiquitous.

That stone you have skimmed over the lagoon touches the surface again, and it is 2019. In her studio Orsola Rosso is turning back and forth in the flame a black, red and gold bead. She looks up, and one hundred years have passed. She and those who matter to her are seventeen years older. Orsola is now sixty-five.

How to summarize one hundred years of the fastest, most extreme change ever? From Mussolini to Berlusconi, FDR to Obama, Hitler to Merkel, Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., Amelia Earhart to 747s. Typewriters to computers, encyclopedias to Wikipedia, telephones to smartphones, walks in the park to runs on treadmills. Penicillin. The Second World War. Hiroshima. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The Cold War, an agreed end, another cold war brewing. Walls falling, walls built. New nations created out

of old nations. Women wearing trousers and voting. Robots. Conspiracy theories.

Underneath all that change, the planet is heating up. The sea is rising, Venice is sinking—leading to one precise moment, 10:44 p.m. on November 12, 2019…

Us. Now.

Orsola was incensed that she could not see her family. Her and Stefano’s apartment was more than two hundred meters away from the Rosso house, and under quarantine rules they were forbidden from walking that far without facing a fine of three thousand euros (fifteen hundred beads).

The stone has crossed most of the lagoon, because you have thrown it that hard, and has touched down at various points over five hundred years. It now makes one final small jump, lands and sinks off the waters of Murano into the present. Orsola Rosso is in her late sixties. She is once more turning in the flame a translucent red bead with flecks of gold leaf suspended in it. Her Antonio bead. She looks up and sees a man…

She is being forced at last to confront the reality she has tried to ignore all her life. Antonio joined terraferma long ago, where time runs differently. That means this Alessandro must be a great-great-great grandson. No, many more greats than that.

“It’s been a tradition in our family to make one of these now and then and send it to Venice. We’ve been doing that for hundreds of years.”

“No one knows. We’ve just been told to by our fathers, who were told to by their fathers, and so on.

“It’s funny, her middle name is Ursula. Like yours. Another family tradition. Scaramal daughters are always given that middle name.” For a moment Orsola thinks she may sob.

The Rosso family and their friends and neighbors have emerged from my imagination. But a few people did exist. Maria Barovier indeed invented the prized rosetta bead; her descendants still make glass on Murano today. Casanova, of course, existed, as did Josephine Bonaparte, who visited Venice in 1797 but did not manage to save it from her husband’s ravages.