Before taking up the subject of Venetian glass, it will be well to say something of another early Italian centre of the industry. It is only of recent years that the important part played in the sixteenth century by the glass-workers from L’Altare, in spreading the new methods through France and the low countries, has been made manifest. L’ALTARE is a little Ligurian town, situated a few miles to the north of Savona. It belonged in the Middle Ages to the Marquis of Montferrat, and the relation of that family both with France and with the East should not be forgotten in this connection. According to the local tradition, the glass industry was established as far back as the eleventh century by a body of immigrants from Normandy, and a French origin has been found for the names of the families employed in the glass-works.[126] At a later date, probably in the fourteenth century, other workmen came from Murano, so that when by the end of the fifteenth century the skilled glass-workers of L’Altare began to seek employment in foreign countries, they became the principal agency by which the newer methods of the Venetians were introduced into Northern Europe. These Altarists must indeed have been a thorn in the side of their Muranese rivals, for, abandoning the stringent regulations by which the Venetian government sought to hinder the emigration of their glass-workers, at L’Altare the self-elected consuls of the craft farmed out their men to foreign states and towns, receiving a substantial payment in return.[127] I do not know of any specimens of glass, either of mediæval or renaissance date, that can be attributed with certainty to the town. At the present day, however, L’Altare is an active centre of the glass industry. Signor Bordoni gives a list of thirteen old families—he himself belongs to one of them—who still carry on the craft. These houses have agencies all over Northern Italy and even in South America. Glass has been made at Venice, or more strictly at Murano, for at least seven hundred years; but what we especially think of as Venetian glass—the graceful vessels of endless variety of form, thin and diaphanous, in which the skill of the glass-blower attains its most complete expression—these were the produce of a comparatively short period, of the sixteenth century above all. During the last fifty or sixty years of the preceding century the Venetians in their enamelled glass were able to give expression to the spirit of the quattro-cento, but of the glass that was made before that time practically nothing is known. After the end of the sixteenth, or at latest the middle of the next century, the art enters into a period of gradual decline, which continued until the partial revival of our own day. But before that decline had set in, Venetian glass-workers had spread over Western Europe, and had revolutionised the art of glass-making. The history of modern glass begins with that of the Venetian _cristallo_ in the sixteenth century.