C is for ...Corning... Colossal ... n... Cut

Hello and welcome! to another A-Z series on M-i-V... 

All through April I'll be posting on the broad theme of Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. Come museum hopping with me!

C is for the Corning Museum of Glass

Museums can be classified into several types based on their collections - Archaeology/History, Art, Science, Natural History, Children's, General and Specialised. Not an exhaustive list, there can be finer subdivisions, or the classification criteria can vary - public/private, size/area etc. 

Today I'm posting about a museum in the specialised category - the Corning Museum of Glass. This was a rather delightful stop roughly halfway on the way to the Niagara Falls. The Museum was first established in 1951 in the 100th year of Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc, a Fortune 500 company.)

The Corning Museum has a collection of over 50,000 glass artefacts that cover 3500 years of glass making history. (Btw, glass as a material was created over 5500 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, in Syria or thereabouts.) From pharaonic portraits to modern day sculptures by well known glass artists, from glass making workshops to live demos, from films on glass innovations to a comprehensive library - it's an amazing array that visitors can enjoy. The Museum receives over 300,000 visitors every year. 

Chandelier  - a very traditional use of glass.

Glass birds and human visitors at CMoG 

Every fold made of glass.

Drinking vessels of shapes and sizes various.

Butterfly sculpture.

Read more about the Corning Museum of Glass here and explore the range of activities the museum offers.

...and also for the Colosseum

The Colosseum is an iconic landmark in Rome, an amphitheatre dating back to the 1st century. As with Greece, Ancient Rome is the other grandparent of the Western cultures and has had far reaching influence through trade on the East as well. Therefore Rome is a must visit for anyone interested in world history.

Like London, I've visited Rome on multiple occasions, from the time I was a schoolgirl to taking my school-age son there. For the larger part of my childhood spent in Nigeria, Rome was the transit point on our flights back to India. Those days transit visas of 24-72 hours were issued on arrival without so many security hoops to jump through (yeah, I know that seems incredible now!) My father would sometimes use the transit  time and take us around the city. Therefore, I've ended up going to the Colosseum multiple times too.

When I first went there, it was massive and massively impressive, however it was just what it was - the largest amphitheatre ever built. The bedtime story that my father most often told me was Androcles and the Lion, so he used that visit to show me a possible setting for that tale. There was no onsite museum then, he painted in the details of the gladiatorial sport himself quite vividly. 

In the 90's a major project was undertaken to restore the monument, as the damages of time and pollution had been considerable. The onsite museum was created during the restoration and occupies the uppermost level. The exhibits include fragments of architectural features of the monument itself, such as mosaics and friezes, as well as ordinary everyday items the spectators brought with them for their day out at the events. They apparently cooked  (and presumably ate), drank, combed their hair, sewed and even wrote poetry!

The Colosseum from the exit of the Roman Forum.

The outermost walls of the monument have crumbled away.

The floor of the arena has been cut away to reveal the passageways
through which the animals and gladiators were brought in. 

The Colosseum received a staggering 12 million visitors in 2023. It has consistently been one of the top ten tourist attractions globally. Read more about the Colosseum and its onsite museum here. 

...and finally, for the Cutty Sark 

The Cutty Sark is a museum ship, a tea clipper from the Victorian era now housed in a dry dock in Greenwich as part of the Royal Maritime Museums. Cutty Sark was one of the fastest clipper in the category in that period. She was built in 1869 exclusively for the seasonal and high value tea trade. 

The Victorians had developed an obsession for consuming 'the first tea' that was docked and sold at London. That fashion spurred the 'tea races' - the tea was loaded at Shanghai and carried back to London with huge sums being made not just on the tea itself, but also in bets on which vessel would dock first.  Tea involved massive amounts of money. 

The Cutty Sark on a fine, sunny summer day.  The total length of
the rigging is 11 miles. The area of the unfurled sails is more than
 30,000 sq ft. A huge amount of textiles in there!  

Wood engraving on the name. The clipper was made
entirely of wood. The hull was covered in a sheet of
metal alloy so that barnacles etc could not damage it.

Water supply on board. 

The Suez Canal opened the same year as the Cutty Sark was built. This was followed by the development of efficient, compound engine steamships on international trade routes in the 1870s. This meant Cutty Sark was forced out of the tea trade in only a decade. The canal shortened the route to China by over 3000 miles, but it was also difficult/riskier to navigate the Red Sea/Mediterranean and there were also expensive tolls involved for the Suez. Both these factors made it commercially unviable for ships like Cutty Sark to ply Mediterranean routes. 

So she was switched to the wool routes from Australia instead where she  also sailed very successfully for roughly 15-16 years till the steam powered vessels edged her out of those routes too.  She was eventually sold to Portuguese firm and became a general cargo vessel. During WWI, she had to face dangerous submarine warfare and was in a poor condition when she was brought in to Falmouth for repairs by a fortunate coincidence, where an English sea captain recognised her (she had been renamed by the Portuguese) and acquired her for a fairly exorbitant sum. 

The Cutty Sark then went onto become a show ship, a training ship for cadets and was finally restored with public support and brought to its current home in Greenwich in 1954 when its eventful life, full of ups and downs ,was over. 

Watch the history of Cutty Sark in this short film below:

The Cutty Sark receives over 350, 000 visitors  every year. Learn more about the tea clipper by clicking the link here.

C could also be for the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo, which  houses the largest collection of Coptic artefacts in the world. It traces the earliest history of Christianity in Egypt from the 1st century AD and its evolution and assimilation of Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman elements through a collection numbering around 15,000. Some of the loveliest old woodwork and icons I've seen. The Museum did not permit photography when I visited it last. Very few footfalls as compared to the pyramids and the main museum, 9 million tourists come to Cairo every year but only a tiny fraction go to this museum. A hidden gem and totally worth a visit. Read about the Coptic Museum here. 

~~~

Did you know that traditionally, museums worldwide observe a weekly closure on Monday? Sundays are usually the busiest days with crowds of visitors, so the museum staff take the next day off to catch their breath. In modern times, some museums with large visitor numbers have done away with closures altogether, only closing for two or three days in a year, for major festivals like Christmas Day. 

Thank you for visiting and reading. Have a wonderful A-Z if you are taking the Challenge and a wonderful April if you're not!

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2026