A Very Unique Style of Glass Blowing

I think Vittorio Costantini is the best glass blower in all of Venice (he is better than all of the glass blowers in Murano combined)! He makes birds, bugs, and fish using a blowtorch on the main island of Venice. The blowtorch is so hot that he needs to use a kiln to cool his work down!

He has a huge personal collection with tons of work in it (my favorite was the magpie because it is very shiny). He gave us a demonstration of how he made birds using rods of glass, a blowtorch, and handmade tools like a plate of metal to make bird tail shapes. I watched him make an azure tit just like the one you will see in the featured image.

He had a very precise technique, and the concentration that he needed to get every detail, from beak to tail, was amazing. He worked in a glass factory in Murano when he was 11 years old. He played a prank on a girl working in the factory… he picked up a blowpipe, dipped the end in melted glass, and BANG! A bubble formed on the end of the tube, expanded, and exploded like confetti (he used this same trick to make the back of the magpie shiny). He showed us this trick in his shop and the glass confetti got all over his books and he needed to dust them off. I bought an azure tit, but I was debating a sunbird. I am very glad that I got my azure tit before someone else bought it. It is very beautiful and he spent a lot of time on it.

My mom and dad got two rainbow trout.

Vittorio is a very unique and amazing artist because he makes all of his work using very beautiful colored glass rods (he makes some of the colors himself by blending two other colors). Vittorio and his wife Graziella may have been the nicest people that we met on our trip. If you want to see more pictures of his work, click here: Vittorio’s Work. Here are videos if you want to see how he works with glass (or go to Venice yourself and visit him): Vittorio in Action (look at video 2 and see if you can guess what he is making before he finishes).