The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. Painters, writers, wood-carvers, knitters, weavers and, yes, glassmakers: creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing.

She looks up and it is no longer 1494, but 1574. Yet

upholstered in silk strapped to his back. And the smells. An intense attar of rose

“Isn’t comfort a kind of cure?” Orsola still hesitated. “It is taking advantage of fear.”

have skimmed that flat stone well and true across the lagoon’s surface. Another skip and it touches down in 1631.

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

She never knew when one would arrive: sometimes they were just months apart, other times years would pass. She kept the first one Antonio had given her in her pocket alongside the Barovier rosetta;

Strange ignoring of time in this novel

touching down in 1797.

Time might race and freeze, expand and contract, but the continuity of Antonio’s dolphins, the knowledge that she was still remembered after

was the solid foundation upon which her life was built,

millions of trees pounded into the bed of the lagoon to create the base that held up Venice. She didn’t understand it, but she was not sure she cou...

“He told Marco yesterday. He said there isn’t the business there once was. With these high tariffs, people are buying their glassware from Prague instead.” She flinched at the name of Antonio’s city. Stefano was watching her. Could he read her mind? She shook her head to clear it. “What about my beads?” “You’ll have to find another merchant to sell them

sensible glassware they can easily take home with them. Simple glasses for the English for their sherry, the French their brandy, the Germans their schnapps. Also figurines of dogs, horses, shepherdesses. Perfume bottles. And of course bead necklaces and earrings.”

For some time now Venetians as well as Muranese glassmakers had been producing seed beads: beads the size of sesame seeds or even smaller, made from pulled glass cane that had been cut into fragments, and used to fashion necklaces and earrings and brooches, or to decorate everything from handbags and belts to dresses and shoes. Though technically they were beads, the process was so different from Orsola’s lampwork that she never gave seed beads much thought. “What do these beads have to do with us?” she asked. “I am looking for beadmakers to sell into North America,” Jonas replied. “That could be you.”

The Austrians—and the Czechs with their burgeoning glasswork—have undercut Murano. But there is a market for seed beads. When I set up as a trade

Marco was wrong: making seed beads was man’s work. First they had to clear enough space in the workshop and outlying buildings to pull one hundred yards of cane. Marco had to practice forming a uniform, proportional pastone that would then be heated and pierced, and Stefano taught Giacomo, Marcolin and Raffaele how to pull it into a long cane. A cousin of his showed them how to chop the cane into tiny cylinders, sieve out the fragments and fill the holes with a paste that kept them open when heated. Then the beads were turned and stirred in a hot drum filled with sand to smooth the edges, and polished in sacks of wheat chaff. Only once they were sorted by size did the women get involved.

the Rossos were shifting from workshop to factory, from quality to quantity, from art to commerce.

But the Bohemians have also developed a different style—heavier and not so elaborate as Muranese glass. It seems

The stone skims across the water, landing in 1915, several months into the Great War.

“They’re made into beautiful things,” Orsola suggested. “Bags, purses, cushions, lampshades, fringe on women’s dresses.” “But it’s the thing that is beautiful rather than the bead,” Rosella said. “Don’t you want your beads to be admired for their own beauty?”

To get to Venice they took a vaporetto—one of the new steam-driven water buses that were putting boatmen like Bruno out of business and turning gondolas into purely tourist attractions rather than daily transportation.

That stone you have skimmed over the lagoon touches the surface again, and it is 2019.

never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

She reached the Riva di San Matteo, the scene of the tip of her life. For forty-five years—sometimes it felt like several hundred—Orsola had stood on this spot and paused for the loss she’d had there, for the path that she had not followed, instead choosing to watch Antonio row away from her. There had been

to force people to change their ways, that this was a giant reset button for humanity. If that was the case, Orsola doubted people would indeed change. As soon as they could, they would go back to consuming, to traveling, to using the world as a playground the way Venice had been used for centuries. And she was

When she did think about it, though, she tried to remind herself that beads brought color and beauty to many parts of the world, whether in the West Indies or the Americas or Africa or New York or even Venice itself. There was a pricelessness to these tiny, hard things. They endured, and retained the history of their owners, and of their makers.

There were two clear pieces of good news. The first was that the new flood barrier was raised for the first time during a storm that would have flooded Venice again, and it worked. The sea level might continue

The second good news: dolphins really did return to Venice. A year after the first, false sighting, footage appeared during the second lockdown of two striped dolphins swimming in the Giudecca Canal close to the