"By making exciting incursions inside the Murano Museum's glass bead collection, documented in over a thousand images , we are allowed to enter the very essence of the matter of every single bead. This impresses and fascinates the visitor page after page.
After almost a century of oblivion, the collection is now being studied from the perspective of an adequate exhibition space in the renovated halls of the museum.
The collection was made between 1861 and 1883 by Abbot Vicenzo Zanetti, and is representative of nineteenth century Venetian and Murano production. In the 1930s of the twentieth century the collection was removed from the museum's showcases and relegated to a warehouse where information about the attributes of individual beads and sample cards were lost.
This volume is the result of a meticulous and passionate search that started from the essays written by Abbot Zanetti on the Museum's collections, on the occasions of International Exhibitions or to document the discoveries that valued glassworks developed in the first half of the 1800s. It rebuilds attributions and paternity of each bunch of beads and every sample card, bringing them back to their ancient splendour.
The Murano Glass Museum's glass bead collection now consists of 85 sample cards; three cloth panels dating back to 1863 - a gift from the "Societa delle Fabbriche Unite, containing 2015 glass beads and 266 bunches of conterie; 91 lamp bead bunches, more or less complete; a few thousand loose glass beads; 492 bunches of conterie and objects decorated with beads - gifts from the most important Venetian and Murano glasswork factories which were in active production in the mid 1800s."