PERLE 6.0
The glass bead trade routes: Spain and Portugal

Natural History Museum of Venice Giancarlo Ligabue

Monday 14 September 2026, 10.00-12.30 and 14.30-17.30
Tuesday 15 settembre 2026, 10.00-13.00

Curated by
Augusto Panini
Chiara Squarcina
Mauro Stocco

Organized by
Monica Piscina

Event organised as part of the project ‘L’Arte delle perle di Vetro: dal museo alla scuola’ (PR Veneto FESR 2021-2027) – Azione 4.6.1 Initiatives in support of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (DGR n°701/2025) – CUP F79125001290002.”

This year marks the sixth edition of the conference dedicated to glass beads, which the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia organizes annually as part of The Venice Glass Week, the festival founded in 2017 to celebrate, support, and promote the art of glass. Each year, the theme chosen provides an opportunity to explore a specific aspect of the history and production of glass beads over the centuries on a global scale, thanks to the participation of renowned national and international speakers.
The dawn of the modern age, marked by the geographical discoveries in the New World and the oceanic routes opened by Spain and Portugal, shifted the focus of global trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, undermining the longstanding Venetian and Ottoman monopoly on the spice trade. Yet, amid this profound transformation, Venice succeeded in reasserting its economic centrality by establishing itself as the leading supplier of glass beads,a strategic and indispensable commodity in the triangular trade linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

PROGRAMME

Monday 14 settembre
10.00-12.30

10.00
Chiara Squarcina, Scientific Director Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
Augusto Panini, Glass Bead Expert and Historian
Welcome and introduction to the conference topics

10.30
Paloma Pastor Rey de Viñas, Museo Tecnológico del Vidrio – Real Fábrica de Cristales de La Granja – Segovia 
From Murano to La Granja: The Journey of Glassmaking Knowledge

11.15
Ignasi Domènech Vives, Museus de Sitges
Between Catalonia and Venice: Relations, Transfers and the Circulation of Glass from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

12.00
Questions from the audience and discussion

_

14.30-17.00

14.30
Pierre Niccolò Sofia, Università di Padova
Cadice e Lisbona: due porte d’accesso al mondo atlantico nell’era dei commerci globali

15.15
Francisca Pulido Valente, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
VICARTE-Vidro e Cerâmica para as Artes-Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia
Millefiori glass unearthed in Portugal featuring distinctive murrine patterns: Venetian or Façon-de-Venise glass artefacts?

16.00
Andreia Martins Torres, Universidad de Salamanca
Beads on Board: Possessions, People and Exchange in the Portuguese Indian Ocean

16.45
Domande dal pubblico e discussione

_

Tuesday 15 settembre
10.00-13.00

10.00
Opening of the proceedings

10.15
Luca Molà, University of Warwick
Venetian Glass Beads for Iberian Markets in the Late Sixteenth Century

11.00
Aitor Labajo Román, Universidad de Valladolid
Geographical Distribution of Glass in Archaeological Sites across the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands

11.45
Augusto Panini, Glass Bead Expert and Historian
Le perle di vetro veneziane nel commercio globale dell’Età Moderna

Ore 12.00
Questions from the audience and discussion
Closing remarks

_  

During the whole conference a translation service into Italian/English language will be available.

On Tuesday, 15 September 2026 at 18.00, the proceedings of the conference “BEADS 5.0. Venetian Beads in the Nineteenth Century” will be presented at the Natural History Museum of Venice Giancarlo Ligabue.

Discover all the events and initiatives of the tenth edition of The Venice Glass Week >

Admission by invitation only, subject to availability

For information: museo.vetro@fmcvenezia.it.

With the patronage of:
Comitato Nazionale Italiano A.I.H.V.

L'articolo Conference sembra essere il primo su Museo del Vetro.

Permanent collection
From 12 December 2025
Murano, Glass Museum

Curated by
Chiara Squarcina
Mauro Stocco

The exhibition, planned to become a permanent collection as part of the museum’s renewed layout, will enhance the value of the rich and varied 19th-century collection of the Museo del Vetro in Murano, exhibiting it for the first time in its entirety. It will also draw public attention to the world’s most complete and important glass museum. 

Visitors will be able to retrace the troubled and fascinating vicissitudes of Murano glass production in the 19th century, from the crisis caused by the fall of the Republic of Venice (1797) to the rebirth of the art and its full development in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to craftworkers and entrepreneurs who used their skills to revive the island’s glorious past. 

All through the first half of the 19th century, the economy of Venice underwent a serious crisis in industry and commerce. The glass sector was one of the worst hit, and the production of art glass almost completely ceased, partly due to the market’s preference for glass styles from other European countries, such as Bohemia and England. The first signs of a renewed interest in Venetian glass and a resumption of the creation of artistic blown glass came in the middle of the 19th century. 

An important part was played by the recovery of rare qualities of glass materials and above all traditional glassmaking techniques, such as Renaissance filigree, successfully revived by Domenico Bussolin in 1838 and a few years later by Pietro Bigaglia. Many of these artefacts were donated by Bigaglia himself to the museum in 1861. Lorenzo Radi worked on recovering coloured gold leaf pastes for mosaics, and also gave a new lease of life to chalcedony glass, perfected in 1856. In 1854 Fratelli Toso was founded, eventually to become one of the most renowned glassworks on the Murano art scene of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1859 the lawyer Antonio Salviati of Vicenza opened a factory in Venice for the production of mosaics, and in 1866 he established a furnace for blown glass. 

The exhibition shows how the splendid Renaissance and Baroque blown glass in the Museo del Vetro, founded in 1861, brought precious inspiration to the masters of 19th-century Murano. After the difficult period of crisis, they reproduced the most refined glass of past centuries, renewing them in the taste of the time with the addition of very fine polychrome ornamentation. 

The glass art of the Roman world was also studied with great interest for its forms as well as style. The most successful process was undoubtedly glass-mosaic or murrino, associated in particular with the name of Vincenzo Moretti. 

In these ways the exhibition exhaustively retraces one of the most interesting and compelling chapters in the long history of Murano glass through the masterpieces in the collection of the Museo del Vetro, many of them now displayed for the first time. 

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Museo del Vetro.