After the middle of the 16th century, façon de Venise wine-glasses quickly became common in all of Western Europe. Originally, similar glasses were only made in Venice, but many glassblowers braved the death penalty and escaped to other parts of Europe, especially to the Netherlands, from where glass was also taken to the North. For instance, on 27th May 1576 a shipload of façon de Venise ‘cristallo’ glasses arrived to Stockholm from Rotterdam. The wine-glasses were of thin, colourless glass. Numerous fragments of these elegant glasses have been found in Stockholm, and they include fragments of the so called San Marco goblets, which had a stem decorated with lion’s heads, the attribute of the saint.
