Few countries have shaped the idea of luxury craft like Italy — from glass spun like sugar on a Venetian island to velvet woven for popes, and leather burnished by hand in a Florentine workshop. These are crafts measured not in hours but in lifetimes, passed from master to apprentice for five hundred years and more.
✨ Fun fact: Venice moved all its glassmakers to the island of Murano in 1291 — partly to guard their secrets, and partly because the furnaces kept setting the city on fire.
Murano glass
The most famous of all is Murano glass, blown on the Venetian island for more than seven centuries. In the 1450s a Murano master named Angelo Barovier perfected cristallo — a glass so pure and clear it seemed like rock crystal — and changed European taste forever. The Barovier family are still making glass on Murano today, one of the oldest working dynasties of craftspeople on earth.
Murano's masters went on to perfect millefiori (“a thousand flowers,” canes of coloured glass sliced to reveal tiny blooms), the lace-like threads of filigrana and reticello, and goblets so fine they seem to weigh nothing at all. For generations the secrets were guarded so jealously that a glassmaker who left the republic could be sentenced to death — and, equally, showered with privileges to keep him home.
Florentine leather
In Tuscany, the craft is leather. Florence has worked fine leather since the Middle Ages, when its tanners and gilders formed one of the city's proudest guilds. The hides are vegetable-tanned the slow way, then tooled, gilded with gold leaf and stitched by hand into bags, boxes and the bindings of books. The tradition is still taught at the Scuola del Cuoio, the leather school founded inside the monastery of Santa Croce after the Second World War, where you can still watch an artisan gild a spine by hand.
The silks of Venice, Florence, Genoa and Lucca
What we love most, naturally, is Italy's silk. In the Renaissance, Venice, Florence, Genoa and Lucca were among the greatest silk-weaving cities on earth. Genoa gave its name to a dense, jewel-like velvet; Venice perfected soprarizzo, a velvet with two heights of pile that catches the light like nothing else. These were the sumptuous cloths that clothed popes and princes — the close cousins of our own kamkhwab.
We know just how splendid they were because the great painters recorded them thread by thread. When Agnolo Bronzino painted Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence, around 1545, he rendered every loop of her brocaded velvet gown — a cloth of silver and pomegranate so precious that it, and not her face, is what you remember. His portraits are, in a sense, the finest surviving catalogue of Renaissance Italian weaving.
Fortuny — Venice's modern master
Centuries later, one artist made Venetian textiles new again. Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949), working from a palazzo on the Giudecca, invented the Delphos gown — a column of finely pleated silk whose method he never fully revealed — and printed velvets with metallic pigments that shimmered like the old brocades. He proved that Italy's silk was not a museum piece but a living art, exactly as we believe of Banaras.
The thread we love
Glass, leather, silk — what unites them is a refusal to hurry, and a belief that the hand can do what the machine cannot. It is the same belief behind every Banarasi we weave.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Murano so famous for glass?
Venice concentrated its glassmakers on Murano from 1291, where masters like Angelo Barovier perfected cristallo, millefiori and filigree over centuries — secrets so valuable they were once guarded on pain of death.
Who was Mariano Fortuny?
A Spanish-born artist who worked in Venice (1871–1949), famous for his finely pleated Delphos silk gowns and his printed velvets, which revived the splendour of old Venetian textiles for the modern age.
Was Italy known for silk?
Yes — Renaissance Venice, Florence, Genoa and Lucca were among the world's leading silk centres, famous for velvets and brocades, some of which are still hand-woven in Italy today.
Sources & further reading
On Murano glass, the silk-and-velvet weaving of Renaissance Italy, and the art of Mariano Fortuny, see the open-access collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.
