Murano

Why it matters

Murano is a cluster of seven islands in the Venetian Lagoon, linked by bridges across eight channels, about a mile north of Venice and about a mile across. Around five thousand people live here. It was once an independent town with its own Grand Council and even its own coins, and it is now part of the municipality of Venice.

It is famous for one thing. In 1291 the Republic, afraid of fire in a city built largely of wood, ordered all the glassmakers of Venice to move their furnaces here, and Murano has been the home of Venetian glass ever since. Glassmaking is still the island's main industry, and to walk its canals is to walk past furnaces that have been burning for centuries.

An island town before the glass

Murano was settled by the Romans, and from the sixth century by people from the mainland towns of Altinum and Oderzo. It prospered first as a fishing port and through salt, and it controlled a port on Sant'Erasmo. From the eleventh century it declined as islanders moved to Dorsoduro in Venice, and from the thirteenth century, though it kept a Grand Council like the city's, it was governed by a podestà sent from Venice.

Early in the second millennium hermits of the Camaldolese order settled on one of the islands and founded the monastery of San Michele di Murano, which became a great center of learning and printing. Fra Mauro, the cartographer whose map of the world helped Europeans explore it, was a monk there. The French suppressed the monastery in 1810 and the monks were expelled in 1814; its grounds became the city's cemetery.

In the fifteenth century Murano became a place where Venetians came to escape the city, and they built palaces here, among them the Palazzo da Mula. Until the nineteenth century much of the island was orchards and vegetable gardens, before housing replaced them. And its name traveled: a Murano-born architect working for the King of Poland in the seventeenth century named his Warsaw palace after his island, and the district of Muranów still carries it.

The glass monopoly

Murano's glassmakers became some of the most privileged people in the Republic. By the fourteenth century they were allowed to wear swords, were immune from prosecution by the Venetian state, and married their daughters into the richest families in Venice. The price was that they were forbidden to leave: the Republic guarded the secrets of its glass and crystal as a state asset.

For centuries Murano held a monopoly on fine glass in Europe, first for beads and mirrors, later for chandeliers. Its makers developed or refined optically clear crystal, enameled glass, aventurine glass shot through with threads of gold, millefiori, or a thousand flowers, milk-white lattimo, and glass imitations of precious stones. Some glassmakers took the risk of leaving anyway, setting up furnaces in other cities and as far away as England and the Netherlands, and by the end of the sixteenth century the monopoly was partly lost. Decline set in during the eighteenth century, but the craft survived, and the island's historic glassworks include some of the best-known names in glass in the world.

What you see

From the water-bus landings, walk along the Fondamenta dei Vetrai beside the Rio dei Vetrai, the glassmakers' canal, lined with workshops and showrooms. Many glassworks let visitors watch a master at the furnace shaping molten glass on the end of a pipe. Further on, the canal meets Murano's own Grand Canal, crossed by the Ponte Lungo.

The Glass Museum, the Museo del Vetro, occupies the large Palazzo Giustinian. It tells the history of glassmaking and shows glass from ancient Egypt to the present day, including the great eighteenth-century table centerpieces of Giuseppe Briati, whole gardens and palaces made of glass.

Beyond it stands the church of Santa Maria and San Donato, known in Italian as Santi Maria e Donato, one of the oldest in the lagoon. It is known for its twelfth-century Byzantine mosaic pavement, and it is said to house the bones of the dragon slain by Saint Donatus in the fourth century.

Back toward the landing, the church of San Pietro Martire, the glassmakers' parish, has paintings by Giovanni Bellini and the chapel of the Ballarin family of 1506. By the landing on the open lagoon stands the island's white lighthouse, and on another island just south of Murano lies San Michele, the city's cemetery island.

Buying glass honestly

Murano glass is imitated around the world, and much of the cheap glass sold as Venetian in the city's souvenir shops is not made here. The Veneto Region protects the island's work with a registered trademark, Vetro Artistico Murano, which certifies glass made on the island; the most famous furnaces carry it. If you want the real thing, look for the mark, buy from the makers themselves, and expect real work to cost what it takes to make.

Some of the companies that own the island's historic furnaces are among the most important names in glass, and the oldest still working, Pauly and Company, was founded in 1866. Around 260 companies still operate on Murano, employing some 1,100 people.

How to visit

Murano is a short ride by water bus from the north shore of Venice, and several lines serve its landings. Allow half a day, or combine it with Burano and Torcello farther out, which makes a full day on the water (see itineraries).

Check the museum's and the church's times before you go. Most of the glassworks welcome the public, and a demonstration at the furnace is the reason to come.