Two Furnaces

Two Furnaces is a modern Romeo and Juliet set on the glassmaking island of Murano, in which the lovers choose to live. For sixty-three years, the Ferro and…

I. The Rio dei Vetrai

On the island of Murano, in the lagoon of Venice, there is a canal four meters wide, and on either side of it there is a furnace that has not stopped burning in sixty-three years. The furnace on the north bank belongs to the Ferro family. The furnace on the south bank belongs to the Zanchettas. They are both very old, very proud glassworks, with brick chimneys and arched windows and long, crooked, glowing halls where men in leather aprons gather molten glass on the ends of iron pipes and breathe it into shape. They make chandeliers and goblets and the little glass fish that tourists buy by the thousand. They make, on their best days, things so beautiful that people stop in the street and forget to speak. And for sixty-three years, the families have not spoken to each other at all. Nobody under the age of fifty could say exactly how it began. There was a recipe, everyone agreed. A ruby red, the famous rosso, which is made with gold and took the Ferros and the Zanchettas a century to perfect. There was an apprentice who left one workshop for the other in the winter of 1962, carrying a notebook. There was a chandelier for a church in Treviso that shattered on delivery, and a lawsuit, and a funeral at which two old men stood on opposite sides of the grave and did not look at each other. By the time the original quarrel had been forgotten, the feud had grown strong enough to live on its own. They did not speak in the street. They did not buy from the same baker. When the vaporetto stopped at Murano Colonna, the Ferros got off on the left and the Zanchettas on the right. When a Ferro grandchild married, no Zanchetta was invited. When a Zanchetta died, the Ferros sent flowers with no card, which was understood to be both a condolence and an insult. Giulia Ferro had been raised on it like milk. She was twenty-eight, a glassblower and designer with burn scars on both forearms and a tangle of dark hair tied up in a scarf. She had grown up in the Ferro workshop, among the roar of the furnace and the clatter of the pipes, learning from her grandfather, the old maestro, Luciano Ferro, a tiny, ferocious, white-haired man who could shape a glass swan in forty seconds and could hold a grudge for forty years. She loved him more than anyone alive. She was, in the family, considered the most gifted pair of hands in three generations. And every morning at six, when she opened the shutters of the studio window above the canal, she looked straight across four meters of green water at the studio window of a man she had never spoken to, and who had never, as far as she knew, looked back. His name was Matteo Zanchetta. She knew that much. She also knew, from fifteen years of professional espionage, that he was thirty, that he had the best hands of his generation on the opposite bank, and that he was a better glassblower than she was. She hated him with a quiet, steady, professional passion.

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Quick answers about Two Furnaces

What is Two Furnaces about?

Two Furnaces is a modern Romeo and Juliet set on the glassmaking island of Murano, in which the lovers choose to live. For sixty-three years, the Ferro and…

Is Two Furnaces free to read?

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How long does it take to read?

This story runs 8 chapters — most readers finish in one sitting, and you can stop and return to any chapter using the contents list.

Who wrote it?

Nimra Khan — original fiction published on RapidTale.