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business here on Murano.
The English King Charles seemed to want to create London
anew, and fill his grand modern buildings with mirrors
and glasswork. There was, therefore, much demand from
that chilly capital for the work of Corradino and his comrades.
    Although Corradino had finished the main frame of his
chandelier there was still much to do. It was growing dark,
and one by one, the fire-breathing mouths of the furnaces
were extinguished, doors closed, and his fellows left. He
called to one of the garzoni to a last errand, and as the boy
ran through the fornace, jumping over iron pipes and dodging
around buckets as the men worked, Corradino smiled and
thought the apprentices' nickname `scimmia di vetro' - glass
monkeys - seemed particularly apt.
    The boy was soon back with the box. `Eccolo Maestro!
    Corradino opened the long rosewood box. Inside were
100 small square partitions, all numbered, all lined with a
wad of flock wool. Corradino got to work. He took a
small pontello, much smaller than his trusty blowpipe, and
dipped it into the glass that lay, molten and unformed,
waiting, at the bottom of his furnace. He pulled out the rod which now resembled a lit candle. Waiting a moment,
he then plucked the glowing orb from the rod and began
to roll the glass in his palms, and then more delicately in
his fingers. When satisfied, he pulled out a string of the
glass to form a teardrop, and fashioned a delicate hook on
its end. He dropped the jewel he had made into the bucket
of water that rested between his knees.After a long moment,
he plunged his hand into the bucket and rescued the
gem.

    His action brought to his mind the stories of the pearl
fishers of the East, stories that were brought back in the
days of Venice's mastery over Constantinople, way back in
the thirteenth century.
    Do those boys who dive for pearls in the deep, striving for the
oysters while their lungs burst, feel the same satisfaction I do?
Surely, no: when they find a pearl, it is mere luck - a beneficence
of nature. When their brothers in the Hartz mountains in Germany
who mine for silver in the heat and dark of the hills, find a pure
seam of silver, do they feel as if they have created this treasure?
And you diamond miners of the Africas, as you prise a perfect
gem from the rocks, can you feel the pride that I do? No, for I
have made these things of beauty. God made the others. And now
in this world of men, in our seventeenth century, glass is more
precious than any of your treasures; more than gold, more than
saffron.
    Dry instantly in the heat of the flames, the droplet Corradino had made was placed delicately in the compartment marked `uno' in the rosewood box. Even nestling in
the wool flock its diamond-like purity was not dulled.
Corradino sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Angelo
Barovier, the Maestro who had, two centuries ago, invented
this `cristallo' glass of hard silica with which Corradino now
worked. Before then, all glass was coloured, even white
glass had an impurity or dullness, the hue of sand or milk
or smoke. Cristallo meant that, for the first time, full transparency and crystal clarity could be achieved, and Corradino
blessed the day.

    Corradino turned back to the making of his droplets.
He still had ninety-nine to make before he would allow
himself to return to his quarters for his wine and polenta
supper. He could not entrust this work to one of the
servente apprentices, because each one of the hundred droplets was different. In a move that had astounded his fellows,
Corradino insisted that each droplet, because of its position
on the chandelier, its distance from each candle, had to be
a slightly different shape in order to transmit the same
luminescence from every angle when suspended from the
ceiling of a church or palazzo. The other glassmakers in
the fornace and the boys used to gaze for hours on end at
the contents of Corradino's droplet boxes, shaking their