A visit to NasonMoretti, Murano
NasonMoretti has thirty greens. Not thirty shades mixed from one, but thirty separate recipes - sand, soda, a measured pinch of metal oxide - each worked out at the furnace and kept, so that a green made this morning matches the one made in the same room fifty years ago. The most famous is Verde Soraya, named for the Persian princess. It looks like the sea off the Lido on a still day.
On my recent trip I crossed to Murano to meet Filippo Nason. His family founded the glassworks on the island in 1923, and still runs it; Filippo is the son of one of its three current owners. He walked me through the whole of it, from the beginning. The raw ingredients first, in their sacks and bins, looking like nothing in particular. Then the recipes, and what each one does. Then the furnace.
I have watched glass being blown before, but never quite like this. A small team moves around the maestro without speaking much, each knowing where to stand. A gather of molten glass is lifted from the furnace on the end of a pipe, turned, breathed into, turned again, returned to the heat, drawn out with tools that look as if they have not changed in centuries, because they have not. Nothing stops moving. The glass will not allow it. A goblet takes shape in the time it takes to describe it, and then is carried away to cool slowly overnight, as if being put to bed.
Then Filippo took me into the archive, and the hundred years arrived all at once. Shelves of pieces the family has gathered and kept since the beginning. Glass of the 1930s, when Gabriele D’Annunzio collected it. Lidia, the series that won the Compasso d’Oro in 1955 and went into the collection of MoMA in New York the following year. The Rep goblet, which has stood on the state tables of the Quirinale.
What struck me was that none of it felt like a museum. The archive is not where the past is put away. It is where the furnace checks its work. The greens on those shelves are the greens still coming out of the fire.
The pieces at The Leopard are the house as it is now - designers such as Marco Zito and Matteo Zorzenoni working inside that century of colour. My favourite may be Zito’s Trio: a bedside carafe with a tumbler that inverts over its neck, the kind of thing that once waited on the marble dresser of every good European hotel room. Draw the curtains, and it would tell you exactly where you were.
Our NasonMoretti selection is exclusive to Australia through The Leopard, in store in Moss Vale and online.