Summer Reading: Three Books on Venice and Murano
“Beads fill the spaces between things. They don’t get in the way.” — Tracy Chevalier, The Glassmaker
There is a particular kind of summer book for when we most want to be transported. For those of us who love the water and light of Venice, the best of these books let you live inside the city for a few hundred pages rather than simply visit it. Here are three books we keep returning to. One offers romance, one offers a history of glass, one offers the sideways gossip of a city that never stops talking about itself.
A Thousand Days in Venice: When the City Chooses You
Marlena de Blasi’s memoir begins the way the best Venetian stories tend to begin, with an encounter too improbable to be anything but true. An American chef, recently divorced, is noticed across the Piazza San Marco by a Venetian banker. A year passes. They meet again, by chance, in a café. He speaks little English and she speaks only “food-based Italian.” Within months she has sold her house in St. Louis and moved to Venice to marry the man she calls, for most of the book, simply “the stranger.”
What follows is less a tidy romance than a record of two people learning each other’s habits, lives, and appetites. De Blasi writes about the city of Venice the way a cook writes a recipe, through the senses. The love story moves quickly and the prose is warm, but that warmth is really the point. This is Venice as the place that rearranges a life, told by someone who let it.
The Glassmaker: A Family, an Island, Five Centuries
While de Blasi’s Venice unfolds over a thousand days, Tracy Chevalier’s unfolds over five hundred years. The novel opens in 1486 with nine-year-old Orsola Rosso, daughter of a Murano glassmaking family thrown into crisis when the patriarch dies. Glass is men’s work, so Orsola teaches herself the secret art of bead-making, a craft her brothers consider too humble to bother with, and therefore, conveniently, hers.
The audacious heart of The Glassmaker is Chevalier’s structural conceit of time. In her Venice, time moves like a stone skipping across water. Decades pass beyond the lagoon, including plague, the fall of the Republic, two World Wars, even Covid, while Orsola and her family age only a handful of years between chapters. It lets one woman’s life carry the whole history of Murano glassmaking, from prized blown vessels to the lowly beads.
Nearly everyone agrees on the texture of the world she builds, the furnace heat, the guarded techniques, the particular status of a bead among grander things. For anyone who has ever held a piece of Murano glass and wondered at the hands that shaped it, this novel imagines those hands across half a millennium.
The City of Falling Angels: Venice After the Fire
John Berendt’s book opens with an actual disaster, the 1996 fire that destroyed the Gran Teatro La Fenice, Venice’s opera house. What begins as an inquiry into who burned the Fenice becomes something stranger and more entertaining, a portrait of the eccentrics, expatriates, and old Venetian families who make the city run, or fail to.
Among them is Archimede Seguso, a celebrated glassblower who watched the Fenice burn from his window and, in response, created glass pieces commemorating the fire. In Venice, even catastrophe gets metabolized into art, usually through glass. Berendt, who made his name chronicling Savannah’s strange social order in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, brings the same eye for gossip and procession here, from the preservationists of Save Venice to Ezra Pound’s last years in the city. It is Venice not as postcard but as small town.
A Lagoon for Every Mood
Read together, these three books make an unlikely but satisfying set: a love letter, a multigenerational saga, and a wry social history, each circling the same watery, light-struck city from a different angle. What they share is a conviction that Venice is never merely a backdrop, it reshapes whoever spends real time within it, whether that’s a chef from St. Louis, a bead-maker on Murano, or a writer who meant to stay a few months and found there was always one more story.
Read one or read all three, these books let Venice do what it has always done, it slows the hours, and asks that you look more closely at the light.
To bring your own piece of Venice home with you, please find all of our available hand-blown Murano glass here!