Souvenir: From Capri to Honolulu – shot glasses from all over the world

Around 1830 the first glasses appeared in the Bohemian spas, which were decorated with vedute of Karlovy Vary and Marienbad. These were fountain glasses that every spa guest needed for their drinking cure – an important part of the program of these cures was the walk to the mineral fountain and strolling on the promenade.

Always in your hand your personal fountain glass, which of course should “make something good” and which was often taken home as a souvenir at the end of the cure. In the traditional baths, thousands of glasses from the Silesian and Bohemian glassworks were in the shops during the season.

At the end of the 19th century, when the guests became annoyed with lugging their glasses around, the spa administration introduced a numbering system with the help of which the guest at the fountain was given his personal glass. So the bathing glasses became purely useful objects again and the ornate strolling glasses became real souvenirs, but sales of these were rapidly declining. The old bathing glasses are now popular collector’s items, available in antique shops and at glass auctions.

Souvenirs with vedute of Rome were popular

Even in ancient Rome, the upper class made educational and bathing trips and brought small engraved glass bottles with them as souvenirs that showed coastal panoramas or cityscapes. Later, from the second half of the 16th to the 18th century, the male offspring of the European upper-class went on the “Grand Tour”, an educational trip that often lasted several years through England, France, Spain and Italy, with Rome as the highlight.

Back then, drawn or painted vedutas of the ancient remains of the Eternal City were popular souvenirs. At the time, the ladies only had the spa treatment, a trip to places like Karlsbad or Pyrmont, with the restrained glamor of health, purity and freshness and the bath glass as a souvenir.

The antique specimens with ground-in vedute are just as suitable for drinking schnapps as the printed mass-produced goods that are now sold as city souvenirs.