It is named Paropàmiso, after a mount situated in the Indu-Kush mountains, in the Pamir plateau. The one-light shop in Frezzeria 1701, the street of the gunsmiths who produced arrows in the Piazza San Marco district, reproduces on its signboard the title of a book by the Italian traveller and orientalist Fosco Maraini. It sells all kinds of necklaces, jewels and stones, smartly carved wooden or ivory products of the noblest oriental handicraft. This shop-window of multicoloured preciosities is seen by thousands of passing-by tourists, who turn into the calle in order to soothe the dizziness provoked by the magic of Venice or by the summer light of the great square.

Michiel Paciello, the 56 years old Franco-Italian owner of the shop, one of the world’s most expertized collectors, keeps the rarities which attract to Paropamiso collectors from all the world wrapped in lined-up clothes in the little wall safe at the bottom of the shop. In order to see those rarities there is even people who, informed by an e-mail, comes from Tokio, from California or New York, from London or Dubai.

Glass is a poor material, but when it has the glaze of centuries, its pastel colours smoothed after having been wore by noble necks, the ancient and unique tones result of secret mixtures and of unspeakable blows by master glass-makers breathed in magic bubbles, then the glass becomes more precious than gold. Michiel is proud to say that he sells ancient venetian beads. Each necklace is evidence of creative uniqueness and of feminine vanity, made precious by the shadows of time. Many of them would deserve being exposed in the shop-windows of Place Vendôme, in Paris.

After a decline that caused the disappearance from Murano, the island of glasswork, of the Conterie (deriving from the verb "contar", to count, that refers to the act of counting by means of ringing on a thread little balls or beads of different geometrical shapes), workshops which have a great artisan glasswork tradition, there is now a new vitality of the workshops. In the last fifteen years beads are come back on the fashion scene, and stylists like Pucci, Schoen, Ferré use them with a modern look and fantasy. Rutilant jewels of several different workmanships, that for at least eight centuries were pride of the Serenissima and protected by the laws of the Council of the Ten that wanted the secrets of workmanship to remain exclusive of the Republic, are now on the pages of trendy women’s magazines. Hand-threaded by the "impiraresse" (from the verb "impirar", to thread), that is to say women that made necklaces of all dimensions, the beads which were born in the glasswork workshops will later on become part of first class jewelry. Michiel knows it and favours this market with products which have an artistic dignity of their own. Michiel Paciello discovered beads in the Sixties, during his first travels as globetrotter in the East. Born in 1947 in Tolon, France, from an Italian father, he went to live in Paris in 1966 in order to attend the faculty of economy. There he finds the “on the road” atmosphere of Kerouac and there,on the trottoir of Saint Germain, stroll the first hippies; young people begin to go on holiday through routes that from Istanbul stretch out towards Iran and Afghanistan, looking for freedom and dreams, or towards North Africa, then going back to Europe through Gibraltar. Michiel leaves too, he goes hitchhiking through Bulgary, Turkey, Syria, Giordany and Egypt. He is given a lift on a truck transporting second-hand cars driving to Teheran: Michiel pays the driver, who loads one more car for him. One time he lands at Alessandria from a merchant ship on which he had embarked in Aqaba together with other five globetrotters enrolled to clean the deck of the ship.

In 1970 he finishes university, and at the border near Triest he leaves on the van of Jean Louis Amicau, a bric-à-brac expert who at that time was 28 years old, that teaches him to distinguish between old and ancient, worthy and worthless. From Istanbul to Teheran and then to Kabul, capital open to the West just since 1956, primitive but fascinating. Kabul is surrounded by a semi-savage country, with a population of goathers and warriors which in 1897 had destroyed two English expeditionary forces. Michel and Jean Louis belong to the second generation of traders: the country had already been visited by the wealthy antique dealers of the 50’s who had plundered millenary precious objects such as swords, statues, war harnesses of 2000 years ago. They bought rare but cheap objects from a small network of salesmen. In the dusty “Chicken Street”, the street of the chicken’s market, they buy up tiny furniture appreciated by the minor European antique dealers. The chicken dealers had transformed into antique dealers and on their stalls could be found also objects once belonging to soldiers of the two unfortunate campaigns of His Britannic Majesty. There was also abundance of jewels in silver and turquoise agate , abundant and very cheap. Agate was used by Muslims to carve sura’s from the Koran which were then used as necklaces; the two youngsters also discovered some fakes, with a Boehemian mark of the nineteenth century on them. The Magyars had already been selling coloured glasses in Kabul since two centuries.

So Michel looks for necklaces, he asks for them to the merchants he meets in North Africa, he has learned to recognize them, to fix the price and, most important of all, to compare them with the Venetian ones. He is helped in his work by three experts who trade this apparently minor product: Gianni “Volpe” Di Carlo, Giovanni Sarpellon, Arnaldo Moretti and a certain De Gasperi, from Novara. The glass beads that in those years were completely ignored in Europe are instead already in great demand in the United States, where Americans consider them as artistic evidence of their brief national history. “Beads go round the world together with moods and migrations”, tells Michel. Nowadays he listens to traders from all the world and discovers necklaces with strange origins. In 1980 he exposed some beautiful, really old necklaces he had bought from an African, and the Venetians said they were too beautiful to be true. He found some in Iran, in the cities of Mashad and Qom, where they had arrived in 1700 from Syria, and then some others in Akkra, Ghana, in Elmina and in Togo. The beads come back to the lagoon after an unusual route that has brought them from 1700 on from Murano to Brussels, city of sorting, and from there to the places of big business, included the New World. They were given to the American Indians in exchange for furs and in Africa in exchange for ivory, gold and slaves. In Alaska there still is some specimen of russian bleu, which hunters swapped with the redskins in 1800. Beads were put together with rhum, fabrics and rifles, the Old World’s merchandizes, and produced profits up to 1000 per cent, as to a report of 1630.

The necklaces discovered today are worth millions, also because the sources of collection are running out, besieged by a big artificial market. Michel recognizes the original ones for their workmanship, mixture and wear and tear. He distinguishes them at a glance between a thousand fakes, he knows how to date them and to give them a price, a price which the collectors coming to the Serenissima pay without turning a hair.