This antique Venetian millefiori looks a little like Christmas peppermint candy among greenery. Two crisp designs spiral around the 22x12mm bead that takes extraordinary skill and was done beautifully in this example
Millefiori, the Italian name for these colorful beads, means 1000 flowers.
The beads are decorated with slices of glass canes created either, by bundling super thin glass rods together to form the pattern then fusing them, or encasing round or star pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface as the semi-molten glass cores of the beads are rolled over them, picking up the slices.
Made in Venice, Italy for the African trade, early 1800s to early 1900s.
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