Murano

In 1291, all of Venice’s glass furnaces were moved to the ancient island city of Murano, the better to control the risk of fire and industrial espionage. For Venice made the finest glass in Europe – transparent crystal, spectacles, blown-glass mirrors and coloured glass and beads – and it held on to its secrets until the early 17th century. To meet the demand for cristallo di Venezia the kilns burned day and night, and the glass workers laboured in shifts in the searing heat, except in August and September, when they relaxed at bullfights and ‘other rowdy sports’.

But the glassmakers had other compensations. Even more than the arsenalotti they were treated as the aristocrats of Venetian artisans, ennobled, they claimed, by the French King Henri III on his way from Poland to France. Murano was permitted to govern itself as a kind of autonomous republic of glass, with a population of 30,000, minting its own coins, policing itself, even developing its own ‘Golden Book’, whose enlistees built solid palaces along Murano’s own Grand Canal.