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Bolle

On Murano, an island near Venice, Italy, glass artisans go to work before dawn. Inside one workshop, the kilns have been howling all night, preparing colored glass for the day’s work. In 1921, Paolo Venini, a Milanese entrepreneur and designer, took over this workshop. He founded a company in his name, which has been making, among other things, Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala’s Bolle vessel for 44 years. Roberto Gasparotto, Venini’s art director since 1993, shows us how it’s done.

bolle venini interior workshop portrait worker loading barrel

Color

In a corner of the workshop sit huge vats of mineral mixtures, secret combinations of elements—–sand, silica, salt, manganese, cadmium, iron—–that have been part of Venini’s color repertoire since its founding.

“Paolo Venini was determined to create a new state of the art by experimenting with color formulas,” Gasparotto explains. “They’ve become part of our signature. We always have 10 to 12 colors molten in the ovens, at over 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Wirkkala specified the color schemes for his bottles: straw yellow with red, gray with blue-green, apple green with yellow and amethyst. The clean line between the colored parts that produce the whole—–thanks to an ancient glassblowing technique called incalmo—–highlights the contrast.

“If the color is not good in the morning, the artisans have to wait until the next day,” Gasparotto says. The glassblowers test each color many times to make sure it cools to the correct hue.

bolle venini interior workshop portrait worker handling molten glass

Air and Incalmo

The colors went into the kilns at 4 p.m. the previous day and are ready at 6 a.m. on the day we visit. Artisans blow air into the glass balls at the end of their blowpipes, then roll them along a sawhorse to maintain an even circumference as they bring the bubbles to size.

Incalmo, the art of fusing two pieces of molten glass into one, has existed since the early Renaissance. In the 1960s, Wirkkala discovered that he could make the walls in an incalmo piece much thinner and achieve wider diameters than previously done.

Venini employs six glassblowing masters, each with an assistant. After a master and assistant each prepare a glass bubble, the master opens one end of his and the apprentice, in suit, opens one end of his bubble, which results in two half spheres.

Using experience-imbued jiggering and tools like wax and newspaper to keep the open ends perfectly flat, they connect the two half spheres, add heat, and blow the new piece a tad bigger.
 

bolle venini interior workshop portrait worker at buffing wheel listening to music

Cooling and Buffing

The pieces are left to cool in a long, thin oven that moves them along an excruciatingly slow conveyor belt for several hours. When they are removed, quality control begins: Pieces with any initial flaws are thrown down a staircase that conveniently sits in a lightwell between the workshop’s blowing and finishing rooms. It’s a landfill of eye candy: beautiful colored shards that glint in the sun, waiting to be ground up and taken away for recycling into soda bottles with the rest of Murano’s less fortunate output.

The Bolle’s base still holds excrescences, spurs from the five-petal mounting piece used to transfer the piece from the blowpipe, which are wet-sanded off. Imperfections that can be buffed out are marked with a grease pencil and removed before the piece undergoes several passes on a buffingwheel, followed by a high-pressure wash.

 

bolle venini interior workshop detail completed glass pieces

Finishing

At every step of the process, the artisans are hard at work checking the quality of the Bolles. As a result, the room is peppered with pieces that didn’t quite make the cut. At the end, each piece that makes the grade gets a final check, wipe down, and polish. Each one is then signed “Venini” by a worker using a handheld engraving machine. “When I walk through here, I’m amazed by the human capacity to control art,” Gasparotto says.

The finished pieces are placed in plastic bags with the requisite printed collateral before they are boxed and ready to ship. “There is something truly modern about the level to which Wirkkala understood old techniques,” Gasparotto says. Nearly half a century after it was first manufactured, the Bolle remains among the company’s best-selling items.

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