#RewritingtheFuture of Venice with Murano glass: Luciano Gambaro

Murano Glass can be a concrete response to tourism monoculture: we can ensure the protection of a historical heritage and boost residential life by transforming Murano into a laboratory for artistic and cultural enhancement on an international scale. Luciano Gambaro, Promovetro, for #RewritingtheFuture of Venice

For the project #RewritingtheFuture of Venice we at Venezia da Vivere and Associazione Piazza San Marco are interviewing entrepreneurs, curators, museum directors, university rectors and professors, hoteliers, event organizers, and citizens who live and work in Venice. It is an open debate with the community to create an idea of a city in balance with the environment, work, and its civitas.

For Luciano Gambaro, President of the Promovetro Consortium in Murano, this is the right moment to change by thinking of wealth made of residential settlements for a vibrant and international artisan productivity.

How do you envision Venice in the future?

In the tragedy we are still experiencing, I see a great opportunity for change, the right occasion to embark on a path of discontinuity with that socio-economic policy that over the past thirty years has led us down absolutely inadequate and wrong roads, and Venice to the brink of collapse.

Tourism is now essential to the ecosystem that has been created, but its impact will necessarily have to be less overwhelming, focused more on quality than quantity.

Furthermore, the implementation of diversification strategies that can go beyond tourism monoculture appears vitally important. For example, greater space should be given to new economic activities of a cultural nature and related to artisan work, making the best possible use of that enormous historical-artistic and cultural heritage that has contributed to making Venice great and that cannot risk disappearing.

What can politics and citizens do for a rebirth of Venice?

First and foremost, we must set aside selfishness and destructive parochial interests and come to understand that our future well-being, and that of our city, does not depend solely and exclusively on money, but also on quality of life and the many small things that perhaps in recent months we have begun to appreciate differently than in the past.

The commitment must certainly come from those who govern us and those who administer, but without forgetting that we too, in our small way and in the daily life of our lives, can contribute significantly to building a different and more sustainable Venice.

Propose a specific idea in at least one of these areas: environment, residential life, work, culture, safety, tourism.

Allow me to focus especially on what is my field, the craft I know best. Murano Glass can be, in the tradition and history of our city, a concrete response to tourism monoculture. By transforming Murano into a furnace and laboratory for artistic and cultural enhancement of glass on an international scale, we can ensure the protection of a historical heritage of our city, while at the same time boosting residential life.

I think of the dozens or hundreds of young people, lovers and practitioners of artistic glass, who could come from all over the world to come to Murano to work and develop their knowledge and skills. Where opportunities and incentives are provided, coming to work and live in Murano would bring, on the one hand, generational renewal, and on the other, new residential life. All of this, of course, while respecting an already undertaken path of balance between productive artisan settlement (the word industrial can no longer be applied to Murano) and respect for the environment.

Luciano Gambaro, President of the Promovetro Consortium of Murano.