Spotting Genuine Murano Glass

Murano has been imitated for so long that "Murano glass" now describes two different things: glass actually blown on the island, by furnaces that have worked there for generations, and glass made anywhere else and given the name because it sells. Telling them apart from a photo is hard. It gets easier once you know what to look for.

Look first at the base. Genuine hand-blown glass is finished off a punty rod, and most pieces carry some trace of that - a pontil mark, either left slightly rough or ground and polished smooth, at the centre of the base. A piece formed in a mould, by contrast, tends to have a base that is flat, seamless and identical to every other unit from that mould.

Look at where the colour sits. In furnace-worked glass, colour is part of the molten material, and it behaves like a liquid before it sets - pooling where the glass is thickest, thinning where it's stretched. NasonMoretti's Samarcanda vase is a clear example: the balloton pattern worked into the surface is glass, not a painted or printed layer over it, and colour deepens inside every one of those small diamond cells. A cheap imitation usually sprays colour onto clear glass afterwards - flatter, more even, and without that pooling.

Look for small bubbles and slight asymmetry. NasonMoretti's Borealis pieces run a spiral the full height of the glass, set on the diagonal - and because it's worked by hand, that spiral sits a little differently on every piece in the set. A machine-pressed copy is built for exact repetition; every piece in a set will match its neighbours precisely, which is the opposite of what a furnace actually produces.

Weight is a reasonable last check. Genuine Murano glass is usually heavier for its size than mass-produced glass, because the walls are thicker and the glass itself denser. It's not a perfect test on its own, but combined with the pontil mark and the colour, it rounds out the picture.

NasonMoretti has worked on Murano since 1923. Shop the collection, blown and worked by hand on the island.