Venice - Take 2

After our lovely trip to Rome and seeing the wonderful things we did, we decided that Venice was in need of a once more. We took Angie with us this time so she could get out of the house with Bella. We ended up going to the island of Murano, which is about a 15 minutes boat ride off of Venice. The island is famous for its glass blowing. We went there just to look around and see the different shops and see if we could get a good look at homemade glass blowing.

This is a glass sculpture in a piazza there in Murano. It is amazing. We didn't know it was there but walked around the corner and saw it. It was stunning and beautiful in the daylight. The picture doesn't do it justice. We think, as you have probably though about it breaking already, that it does get broken sometimes but they just replace the pieces. The whole thing also lights up in the evening, which we didn't get to see. (We think the broken pieces get replaced because all the blue on the ground is actually broken glass.)
This was the glass blowing that we did get to see. They were working on a chandalier while we were there. The guy sitting is rolling the pin so get the orange glass (which hardens pink) around the rim of the glass. Basically, they were making a glass container for a 4 bulb ceiling fan - except much fancier and much more expensive. That gives you a general idea though what the piece looked like.

There ducks are the first thing we saw when we got off the boat and onto Murano. We thought they were really interesting until we got up close to them and saw they were all glass. Then we thought they were phenominal. If you see the duck almost smack dab in the middle, you can tell from here that it is a mallard duck. It was 100 times more detailed once you got up close to it.

Finally, this is one more thing in a piazza that we say that was made out of glass. You can't see it very well, but I wanted to put another picture, so this is what you get. It basically is a christmas tree without the greenery. There are a lot of glass ornaments on it that just hang from different parts of the tree. It was fun to see the different parts of it, but I must not have gotten a close up picture. Oh well, maybe next time.

Finally, we headed back to Venice for the remainder of the time and I was able to snap this very classic Venetian picture. It made my day to get this picture as it is one of the things we have always seen Venice portrayed with.