Now ear this

You could say that 14-year-old jewelry designer Adrea Piazza has an ear for color. The Venetian glass-bead earrings she makes are popular with her eighth-grade classmates and their moms. But the multitalented Piazza, who lives in Blue Hill, actually has an eye for color, too. She wears it. She seeks it out in her travels around the world. She designs earrings, necklaces and rings with sky-blue squares, painted teardrops, transparent ovals flecked with orange and gold, cascading red discs and found objects such as postage stamps and children’s stickers. Sometimes her mother, Anne, helps her decide on combinations older women might like, but Adrea is the enterprising artist in the family.

Last summer, Adrea’s project for her final year at the Bay School involved a four-week trip to Italy, the country of her ancestors. Instead of taking audiotapes out of the library, she proposed enrolling in an intensive Italian language institute in Grado, an island in the northern Adriatic Sea. She and her father, Larry, an ophthalmologist in Blue Hill, went together, taking a side trip to Venice to stock up on beads from the famed glass-making island of Murano.

“My parents always pay for the beads, and I always pay them back,” said Adrea, whose triple-threat interests include visual art, music (she plays violin and guitar) and sports (basketball, cross country, soccer, swimming and skiing).

In Italy, the Piazzas met an Italian teacher whom they invited back to Blue Hill. Since Adrea’s two older sisters were away at school, the teacher moved into the Piazza household while working at the Bay School, from which Adrea will graduate this spring.

“I like making things,” said Adrea, whose mane of thick, chocolate-brown hair is sometimes swept into a side ponytail. “I use a lot of glass. It’s sophisticated, but there’s something funky about it, too. I used to do all kids’ earrings, but I’ve moved past that now.”

So far past, it turns out, that Adrea’s signature line, with her handmade display cards, sells exclusively at New Cargoes, a gift shop in Blue Hill.

Adrea is not yet sure which direction she is headed professionally. She wants eventually to live in a city with easy access to bead shops and supply stores. But she’s also still deciding about a pair of earrings with wedding-cake tiers of silver chain and a single, barlike bead of black wood across the bottom.

“Some of these I can’t say goodbye to,” Adrea said. “These I made this morning, and I think I’ll keep them.”

Turns out, her class trip this year was to one of her favorite places: Venice. In her suitcase on the trip home: 200 glass beads.