Pick up a Stories of Italy vase and you are holding a question most people never think to ask: how is Murano glass actually made? The colour seems to float inside the glass rather than sit on its surface. There is no print, no glaze, no painted layer. To understand how Murano glass is made — and why a single piece can take a glassmaker a lifetime to master — you have to follow the colour back to the moment it was still molten.
That is the story behind Stories of Italy, the Milan design studio whose mouth-blown work is curated for design-led interiors by Amprio Milano. For specifiers and stylists, the making is the selling point, so it is worth knowing exactly what happens on the workshop floor.
A Milan studio with one foot in Venice
Stories of Italy was founded in 2016 by Dario Buratto, a Polimoda graduate in Florence who worked at Costume National and Dsquared² before turning to glass. The studio sits in Milan; the hands sit in Murano, the lagoon island off Venice where glassmaking has been concentrated since 1291 — the year the Venetian republic moved its furnaces offshore to protect the city from fire and guard the trade's secrets.
The studio's glass has appeared in collaborations with Diptyque, Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood, and in hospitality settings from the Four Seasons in Florence to the Mandarin Oriental in Paris — a reach that tells you the craft reads as design, not souvenir.
That split — Milanese design direction, Venetian craft — is the whole proposition. Where traditional Murano leans ornate and classical, Buratto strips the silhouette back to four clean forms: Bucket, Olla, Tall and Large. The colour does the talking. You can explore the full range through Stories of Italy's Milan studio, but the shapes matter less than what happens to them while they are still glowing.
How Murano glass is made: colour fused, not painted
Start with the basics, because the answer surprises people. Murano glass begins as silica sand, soda and lime, melted in a furnace until it runs like honey. A master glassmaker gathers a glob on the end of a steel pipe, then shapes it with breath, gravity, wet newspaper and shears — no mould for these pieces, which is why each silhouette carries tiny asymmetries.
Colour is the part that separates real Murano from decorated glass. It is not sprayed, dipped or printed after the fact. The pigment is its own glass — coloured rods and shards melted to the same heat as the base, then physically fused into the body while everything is still soft. When the piece cools, the colour is structural. Scratch the surface and the hue does not lift, because it was never sitting on top to begin with.
For a designer, that distinction is the entire value argument. A printed or sprayed finish wears, chips and dates; fused colour behaves like the glass itself, holding its depth for decades. When a client asks what they are paying for, this is the answer — material, not decoration.
Inside the Nougat technique
Stories of Italy's signature move is the Nougat glass technique, and the name is literal. The glassmaker scatters coloured glass shards — the scaglie — across a hot ivory crystal base, the way you might press nuts into nougat before it sets. The base is reheated and reshaped, drawing the shards into the wall of the vessel. They stretch, smear and drift as the form opens up, so the final pattern is decided by heat and motion, not by a drawing. Because the shards are placed by hand and then pulled by the heat, the glassmaker is composing and surrendering control at once — guiding the colour without ever fully dictating where it lands.
You can read the technique clearly in a piece like the Karkadè Bucket Vase, where deep amber shards bleed across the ivory like a sunset caught mid-pour. Hold it to a window and the scaglie sharpen at the edges in morning light, then warm and soften by evening. The Aquamarine Bucket Vase performs the same trick in cool, sea-glass tones — proof that the method, not the colour, is the constant.
Beyond Nougat: speckle, opaline and gold leaf
The studio runs three variations on the same fused-colour Murano glass technique, and a designer should know them by name.
Macchia su Macchia — "spot on spot" — distributes glossy speckled shards across the surface like animal markings. The Leopardo Olla Vase is the clearest example: amber and brown drifts that read as texture from across a room and as individual flecks up close.
Opaline application swaps saturated colour for delicate white flakes melted onto a clear Murano base. The Opaline White Olla Vase looks nearly matte at distance, then reveals its flake structure when you step closer — a piece that rewards a backlit shelf.
Then there is the most opulent route. The Golden Purple Tall Vase lays a leaf of 24-karat gold over an amethyst Nougat base, so the vase reads cool from one angle and warm from another as the metal catches the light. It is the only metallic in the range, and the piece that makes the strongest case for Murano as quiet investment rather than ornament.
Why no two pieces are alike
This is the part that matters most for anyone specifying for a client. Because the pattern is set by molten motion rather than a template, every Stories of Italy Murano piece is genuinely one of one. Two pink Bucket vases blown in the same week will carry entirely different shard maps. For a designer, that is either a complication or the whole point — you are placing an object that cannot be reordered identically, which is exactly why it anchors a console or sideboard the way a mass-produced vase never will.
It also changes how you buy. You are not selecting a line item; you are selecting this distribution of colour, this drift of shards. Amprio Milano's decorative glass curation is organised with that in mind, so a piece can be matched to a room rather than a catalogue page.
Specifying Murano glass in a real interior
The same craft carries into the studio's lighting. The Ruby Bucket Lamp with linen shade takes a Nougat-coloured body and turns it into a light source, so the fused colour glows from within at dusk — a different argument for the same technique. Lamps and vases together let you run one colour story across a console and a side table without it reading as a matched set.
For interior projects, the honest framing is simple: these are hand-finished objects, so small bubbles and slight asymmetries are signatures of mouth-blown work, not defects. The pieces are built to be lived with — flowers, water, daily light — not kept behind glass.
If you are building a scheme around colour and provenance, the décor and lifestyle pieces curated by Amprio Milano are the place to start. The making is the part you can stand behind when a client asks why one vase costs what it does.
What is the Nougat technique in Murano glass?
Nougat is Stories of Italy's signature method. A glassmaker scatters coloured glass shards, called scaglie, across a hot ivory crystal base, then reheats and reshapes the piece so the shards stretch into the wall. The colour is fused into the body while molten, never painted on, which is why every finished vase carries a different pattern.
How can you tell real Murano glass from imitation?
Look at the colour. In genuine mouth-blown Murano, the hue is built into the glass as fused shards or rods, so it has depth and will not scratch off. Imitations tend to use printed or coated colour that sits on the surface. Small bubbles, slight asymmetry and a one-of-a-kind shard pattern are further signs of authentic Venetian glass making.
How do you care for hand-finished Murano glass?
Treat each vase as hand-finished glass. Dust gently and rinse by hand in lukewarm water rather than using harsh heat or abrasive cleaning, which can dull gold-leaf and decorated finishes over time. Small bubbles and uneven shard patterns are marks of authentic mouth-blown Murano, so there is nothing to fix — simply fill, display and enjoy.
Start your colour story with the Karkadè Bucket Vase, the sculptural Leopardo Olla Vase or the gold-leafed Golden Purple Tall Vase — each one mouth-blown in Murano and impossible to duplicate.
