Venice Burano & Murano Half-Day Tour

Overview

Four hours across the lagoon by boat to the two islands that made Venice's reputation for things done by hand: Murano, where glass has been blown since the thirteenth century, and Burano, where the houses are painted like a paint chart and the lace is made with a needle and no cloth at all.

What to expect

You board at the meeting point and cross open water to Murano first, where a furnace demonstration shows a piece taken from molten to finished in a few minutes. The showroom adjoins the furnace room. From there the boat continues to Burano, where a lace demonstration is followed by time to walk the canals on your own. Four hours covers the crossing, both islands and the return.

Glass with metal growing inside it

One of Murano's strangest materials is a brown-gold glass that glitters as though sugar had been stirred into it. The sparkle is millions of copper crystals suspended in the melt, and it was found by accident in the seventeenth century when metal filings went into a batch by mistake. The island named it for the accident — a ventura, meaning by chance. Getting the crystals to form takes days of controlled cooling, and the recipe was guarded so closely that it was lost twice and had to be worked out again.

Clear glass had to be invented

Glass is naturally green or brown, coloured by iron in the sand. In the middle of the fifteenth century a Murano maker worked out that plant ash from the eastern Mediterranean, combined with a manganese additive, would cancel the tint and produce a material as clear as rock crystal. He called it cristallo, and it is the ancestor of every clear drinking glass and window pane in your life. The company that bears his family name is still trading on the island today.

The women who threaded the world's beads

Alongside the furnaces ran a second industry, done entirely by women at home. Venetian glass beads were traded across Africa, India and the Americas by the ton, and every one of them had to be strung. The stringers worked with a fan of long needles laid in a shallow tray, sweeping them through loose beads so that dozens threaded at once, and were paid by weight. Whole streets did this work, sitting in doorways for the light, and the technique is still demonstrated on the island.

The winter that nearly ended the lace

In the winter of 1872 the lagoon froze, the fishing failed and Burano had no income at all. A school was set up to revive the island's lace as relief work, and when the organisers looked for someone who still knew the old stitches they found a single elderly woman who could remember them. Everything made on the island since descends from what she was able to teach. The school ran for a century, and its pattern books are still the reference.

Both islands lean

Murano's campanile is visibly out of true, and Burano's tilts harder still — the bell tower of San Martino has been leaning for centuries above a canal, on ground that is essentially mud. In a lagoon there is no bedrock, and every tower here is an argument with the water table.

Practicalities

The crossing is on open water and colder than the city, especially in the shoulder seasons. Comfortable shoes matter more than anything else you bring. Cancellation is free up to seventy-two hours ahead.