We visited some of the famous Murano Glass factories in Venice on the third day. These factories were specialized in fancy glass-wares for centuries in Europe.
Murano’s glass-makers led Europe for centuries, developing or refining many technologies including crystalline glass, enamel glass, glass with threads of gold, multicolored glass, milk glass, and imitation gemstones made of glass.
Most of these beautiful Murano glass pieces are very expensive and fragile so bringing them home is not very practical. And we still had a few destinations to go before coming home so we didn't buy any. This decision has brought a lot of regret later.
There's another fine art one could find almost everywhere in Venice is Mask. These Venetian Mask are very well known and very well liked in the world.
They are super fancy and gorgeous. Every one of them is made in a unique way, and none is like the others. Many of them are sold in the hundreds and quite a few are running in the high thousands of dollars.
We stumbled onto a mass-production mask shop sold for a portion of the price that other shops had asked for. They didn't look very bad but they were not very well detailed.
Guess what, these were the Chinese-made masks that were brought here to fool those cheap-spending tourists.
Today, the artisans of Murano are still employing these centuries-old techniques, crafting everything from contemporary art glass and glass figurines to Murano glass chandeliers and wine stoppers, as well as tourist souvenirs.
There were a few high end shops here and there selling the costume we had seen in movies. They are worn during their annual carnivals of mask and costume. I saw some costumes with the price tags in ten of thousands Euros.
We spent at least 10 hours of walking a day. There was no other way but walk and Venice is not small. We had the Venice map with all of its attractions and there's only one way to do it is to divide the city into horizontal grids. By the time we got back to our hotel every evening, we had piled up to 15 miles or more easily. This kind of tourist is not for people with walking challenge.
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