Gorgeous, very long elbow with very rare and complex murrini with turquoise, this would be a prize winner except for a missing slice on the back. It looks like there was a bubble underneath which might have been the cause, then someone tried to grind it down to smooth it out, I'm not sure it helped.
If you have access to a lapidary saw it's easy to cut that section off.
Still an amazing bead for a collector
Trade beads almost always have holes big enough for 2mm leather cords
Millefiori, the Italian name for these colorful beads, means 1000 flowers
The beads are decorated with slices of glass canes created either bundling very thin glass tubes together to form the pattern, then fusing them, or encasing round or chevron pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface and the semi-molten glass cores of the beads are rolled over them, picking up the slices.
Made in Venice, Italy for the African trade mid-1800s to early 1900s
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