Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Ellie Wilson
You can look at me as a sort of last man on the moon,
as the last of the Mohicans,
or as a member of an endangered species.
They may understand.
I am one of the 50,000 inhabitants of Venice
who stubbornly clings to that great island.
But I’m not just one of the 50,000 inhabitants.
I’m also one of the 4,500 that populate Murano,
the quintessential glass island.
The island’s name has always been synonymous
with glassblowing.
I am a master glassmaker, and my family has passed down
the ancient technique of painting on glass, gold leaf, and so on
for centuries.
I might be the last member of a generation
who had to explain why I wasn't into glass blowing,
even though I was born in Murano.
This image shows the Murano of 1700.
Those crosses you see are churches, convents and chapels.
I’ve counted 19 of them.
Before the fall of the Republic of Venice,
there were 19 churches.
There are two left now,
and one of them is part time.
They did not disappear by themselves.
They were destroyed, raided and plundered
during the collapse of Venice
in 1797, when it was conquered.
And what looked like an apocalypse,
what really seemed like the end of the world,
wasn't actually like that.
You see the
and sheets hanging from house walls.
They remind us of what was there before.
And this is where the revelation hits,
what emanates from the mind
and goes through the heart and our memories.
This revelation is the memory of what Venice and Murano used to be.
Two future presidents of the United States,
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,
and Benjamin Franklin,
came to Venice to understand, study,
and to almost try to digest the organization of the state,
rather than assimilate it.
Sure,
it’s easy to see what we are if we think about what we were.
And this is very important.
1797 was a failed apocalypse.
This is because Venice was unique, like an alien on earth.
It was something that everyone had to deal with.
Venetian painters were top of the class,
like Giorgione, Tintoretto, Tiziano, Canaletto, i Guardi, and Tiepolo,
as well as its musicians, like Vivaldi, Lotti, and Zarlino,
and architects, like Sanmicheli, Longhena,
and Andrea di Pietro della Gondola.
What name could be more Venetian than that.
In reality, Andrea Di Pietro della Gondola
was Andrea Palladio.
The two houses of the United States Parliament
unanimously voted
Andrea Di Pietro della Gondola
as the father of American architecture.
Venice came first in literature, publishing, and commerce.
The first copyright laws were written in Venice.
They were first in health prevention
with
These quarantine stations
were created in Venice, which is also where they got their name from.
Murano was also unique
because Venice had given Murano
the role of being a protagonist in the world of glass.
Murano was not a glass district. It was the glass district.
And now?
A new apocalypse seems to be in store for us today.
Three knights have passed by Venice.
The first was high waters,
which virtually submersed machines and ovens.
The second was covid, which prevented continuous work.
There is nothing that relies more on contact
than glasswork.
The third was the surge in production costs and gas
which virtually stifled this technique.
I mentioned three knights.
There are usually four.
The other one is even more insidious
and it paved the way for the other three,
and it makes the two mouths you can see here seem silent.
They are ovens without fire.
This is the knight of the Horseman of the Apocalypse
which forced Murano glass
to compete with other glass, technologies and costs.
It would not let the glass be unique.
It was a matter that became a soul and then became a matter again.
Every piece of glass represents
a story, a tradition, a family, and a memory.
Because ignorance kills even more than the crisis and high costs.
We must explain why Venice decided that all the glassworks had to go there
and why Venice said: “Only those born here can work with glass”
because this is the only way to create that kind of further curiosity
and the desire to go there
to find the very soul of that object.
Glass is more than mere matter.
Anyone can mix stuff.
Glass is the first manmade synthetic material.
How can we do this?
Our history is our only weapon of defence.
It is our only shield against the apocalypse.
Can you see these mirror drawings?
This is the wisdom of an island, a family, and a generation.
That little notebook you see is called “Quaderno delle Partìe”
The "partìe" were the glass recipes.
No furnace could make two pieces of glass that were identical
and no master could make two objects that were identical.
This melting pot
pushed everyone to stand out.
Oblivion is the main risk.
If we forget who we are,
we can accommodate all requests.
We could say that the Bridge of Sighs has that name
because lovers, in the face of so much beauty
(sighs) were sighing.
That's not the case.
History doesn’t necessarily need to be well narrated or well invented.
You can very well tell the truth
and make that truth become the reason why
millions of people come to our Venice, to our Murano,
to see what we were.
Yeah, I’d like to be some kind of walking
a toponym that keeps telling stories
because that is all we can do.
The recipe for this is to do
what is profoundly meaningful in an Apocalypse: revelation.
I want to reveal.
I want to talk about what was there.
The invisible island that nobody calls to anymore
is present in every one of us
living in the Venetian lagoon and on the island of Murano.
I am a choir director.
Did you hear that?
I direct perhaps Europe’s biggest choir, with 300 members.
Using every art form
is very important to me
so that we can use them to make a dialogue and talk to you.
Creating an identity
and making people aware of what they are
makes them stand upright.
Let your diversity become a topic of conversation and discussion.
Music is peculiar
in how it can be melancholy, romantic, or sad.
You just need to put a symbol in front of a note
to make it minor.
My dream is
to make sure that people are able to play, listen to,
and maybe even experience seemingly melancholy music,
but that in the end, by removing the minor note
and adding a major chord
the music becomes joyful.
It becomes a step forward.
My message for all of you, especially the youngest,
is to let your breath, like that of the masters of Murano,
kindle the fire of who we are.
You can make sure
that what seemed like an apocalypse
becomes the beginning of a new era.
Thank you.
(Applause)