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Marina Fiorato |
Story of love and treachery that cuts to art of Venetian glass-making
The Glassblower of Murano.
By Marina Fiorato.
Beautiful Books £7.99. order this book
MARINA Fiorato writes with as much authority about her own experience of childbirth as she does of that which she has no experience at all – the art of making glass.
In her debut novel The Glassblower of Murano, Fiorato dexterously weaves a contemporary tale of Leonora Manin, a broken-hearted female glassblower from Hampstead, with the historical truths of Italy’s imprisoned artisans.
From the white symmetry of Hampstead’s Georgian architecture to the silver palaces reflected in the Venetian canals, Fiorato’s reader discovers at the same pace as Leonora herself the treachery of her maestro glassblower ancestor, the orphaned Corradino.
Leonora secures an apprenticeship with the last-remaining furnace in Murano, a miraculous coup for a woman even by today’s standards, and swiftly becomes the subject of an aggressive marketing campaign depicting her as a modern day Primavera.
Through a stroke of fairytale luck, the man who provides her with a visa also finds her a home and fathers her child.
Venice is the crucible in which the 36-year-old author’s life, love and creativity has been moulded. Fiorato and her husband, director Sacha Bennett, were wed on the Grand Canal in Venice in 2001.
“Meeting him was the single defining thing in my life,” said Fiorato, who has also acted in films and designed audiovisuals for U2 and Rolling Stones’ rock concerts.
Fiorato’s Botticellian gold locks and bright features greeted me at the door of her home in Canfield Gardens in Finchley Road. She bid for the flat in the Fairhazel Housing Co-operative five years ago when she was expecting her first child and still living in a one-bedroom flat in Goldhurst Terrace.
Half-Venetian Fiorato, raised by university lecturer parents, was brought up immersed in academia. Her Shakespeare specialism at Oxford University is reflected in the historical and literary references made throughout the book. Corradino is even told the story of Romeo and Juliet before he fakes his death with a phony vial of poison to escape Venice’s brutal omnipotent Council of Ten.
He betrays the secrets of Murano, a gravely forbidden move, to adorn walls of Louis IVX’s Palace of Versailles with perfect crystal glass.
Pregnant Leonora embarks on an adventure to clear her ancestor’s name and justify her employment at the furnace. Once again, Fiorato’s experience mirrors her heroine’s. She said: “I had just had a baby. Writing the Glassblower was a way of claiming my history and my own heritage.”
This neatly bowed piece of fiction emphasises how good storytelling takes it’s inspiration from real life, past or present and sometimes a bit of both.
SARA NEWMAN
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