The Italian Glass Weeks: Italy’s most important event dedicated to glass

The representatives of Vision Milan Glass Week and The Venice Glass Week, the two most important Italian festivals dedicated to the promotion and enhancement of glass at an international level, both from an industrial and artistic point of view, announced the launch of a new joint festival: The Italian Glass Weeks.

“The Italian Glass Weeks will be the largest event in Italy, and most probably in Europe, that will be dedicated to glass in 2022: two weeks animated by initiatives designed for all kinds of audiences. Culture and technology will be the key words that run throughout the programme: not as two separate dimensions, but deeply and inextricably linked, one functional to the development of the other, according to the peculiar characteristics that distinguish them, making them unique,” commented the President of VITRUM, Dino Zandonella Necca. “With The Italian Glass Weeks we intend to give renewed strength to the positioning of the Italian glass supply chain at an international level, underlining how the Italian proposal is unique and original. Only in Italy, in fact, does glass draw directly on origins that have created and developed a unique history and culture; culture and history that have never stopped, in a continuous flow that has brought them to us via centuries of tradition.”

Any candidate who wishes to propose an event or project in the field of glass will be able to apply to participate in the festival from  March 11, 2022. Applications for the Venetian week will be welcomed until  May 3, 2022, and applications for the Milanese week will be welcomed until  May 30, 2022. The contribution of companies, associations, sponsors and partners who would like to propose their own initiatives to be included in The Italian Glass Weeks will be fundamental to the festival programme, which is already in development with an exciting calendar of scheduled events.

For information about how to apply, and to read the Conditions of Participation: www.theitalianglassweeks.com.

The event, designed specifically for the 2022 “UN International Year of Glass” will feature exhibitions, workshops, art installations, shows, activities for children and families as well as guided tours, cultural seminars, workshops and much more, taking place in Milan and Venice over the course of a fortnight. The Milanese week will run from  September 10 to 18, with a programme that will be primarily dedicated to industrial glass and design, while the Venetian week will run from  September 17 to 25, 2022, and will be dedicated to artistic glass.

“We are particularly satisfied with this new project,” said the Organising Committee of The Venice Glass Week, “which could help to provide great momentum for the artistic glass sector, both this year and in the future. The five-year experience of The Venice Glass Week has paved the way for the creation of something bigger and more ambitious, thanks to the great work of all those who have always believed in the project. For Murano, which represents the homeland of international artistic glass, and which unfortunately is suffering considerably in this economically difficult period, it has the potential to become a moment of rebirth and great international visibility. The collaboration with VITRUM and Vision Milan Glass Week for The Italian Glass Weeks is therefore strategic, especially in this year which the UN has designated as the International Year of Glass. It’s a great sign, and above all it’s an important synergy that we hope will last for a long time.”

For the international public, the cities of Venice and Milan are synonymous with Italian tradition and style. Venice, thanks to the 1000-year-old tradition of glass making that has been handed down from generation to generation on the island of Murano, is the city of artistic glass par excellence, as well as a capital of culture and one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. In Venice, The Venice Glass Week festival has been organised since 2017, taking place across the city centre as well as Murano, surrounding islands and the mainland. Each year the festival has featured over 250 events, involving furnaces and glass companies as well as museums, public and private foundations, universities, art galleries, hotels, restaurants, shops and more.

Milan, which hosted the first edition of Vision Milan Glass Week, is a contemporary city which continues to represent Italy’s technological progress, and which is the true capital of the country’s economy, design industry and production sector. The city is home to GIMAV, the Trade Association belonging to CONFINDUSTRIA, which represents the manufacturers and suppliers of machines, accessories, equipment and special products for glass processing. It is also where, for over forty years, glass industrialists have organized VITRUM, the International Exhibition of machinery and technologies for glass processing.