Pleasures of the plague year
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, visitors to the Grand Canal could rejoice in a spectacle even stranger and more wonderful than the preposterous beauty of that great sweep of water which forms part of the imagination of the world.
A floating glass furnace, an initiative by the Venice Glass Week, bobbed the craftsmanship of the master glass blowers of Murano to the heart of the city in a cobalt-flamed tribute to the visit of the French king Henri III to Venice in 1574, when a virtuoso display of glass-blowing was staged outside the Ca’
