For Venice, a Fragile Future

A church bell is chiming somewhere here in Murano. I look out my window and catch the light, evening light, casting a perfect mix of sun and shadow on the mocha facades.

There’s a conspiracy of beauty that fills all the senses. Italian conversations echo off the walls along the canal, mixing with a guitar strumming somewhere, and the sound of water lapping against the banks, and the sounds of forks on plates. The light on the buildings the color of rose petals and rosemary, cappuccino and cinnamon. The buildings reflected in the channel, abstract shapes and colors that swirl underneath tidy boats tied to old wooden posts. The air is cool and alive.

It’s that sense of timelessness that gives Venice its magic.

“It’s Disneyland,” a friend told me before I came, “but it’s also magical.”

“Let’s never leave here,” I told my girlfriend Cristina as we strolled down the narrow sidewalk that stretches between the water and shop after shop of Murano’s famous glass. It’s the same thing I said as we traveled through southern France just a couple days before.

Maybe Venice is too sweet for everyday consumption. I think I’d get a bellyful of beauty living here. Yet it’s sad to see the very things that make Venice unique in jeopardy.

Real estate prices have made it impossible for locals to stay here, making it even more a city of tourists than before. And Murano’s famous glassmakers say competition from China is putting them out of business. Sometimes, stores selling cheap Chinese replicas sit side-by-side stores selling the originals, and to my untrained tourist eye, the difference in quality is sometimes in evidence, sometimes not.

The difference is usually in pride. Walk into a cheap shop of imitation Murano glass and you’ll likely walk out without a word being spoken. Walk into the shop of an artisan and you get a sense of a pride in the craftsmanship as they show you around the store and sometimes let you watch the glass being blown.

“The Chinese, they make it very, very cheap and they’re invading the market,” says Massimo Bottacin, who works at Gino Mazzuccato’s glass shop. “Not just in Murano glass but everything. Globalization is the problem.”

Ironic words in a city that has been at the edge of global trade and geopolitics for centuries. It was from here, after all, that Marco Polo sailed to China in the first place. Maybe he should have stayed home.

Bottacin’s boss, Gino Mazzuccatto, is more sanguine about Chinese competition.

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” Mazzuccatto says, after finishing spinning a molten tube of glass into a delicate deer. “I had a football team. When we lost, a boy said to me, ‘they other team play very good.’ I say to him, ‘No, we play very bad.’”

So what if the Chinese are making glass, Mazzuccatto says. “We must make better.”

This entry was posted on June 18, 2010 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.