Murano and Burano - When 118 Islands Just ain’t Enough
We spent a full two days roaming Venice’s 118 islands (although each guide we had gave a different number). But, Masha said, aren’t there more? So on the second day, we took a boat tour to four of the bigger islands, of which Burano and Murano (😁) were the headliners.
Burano is the island of absurdly colorful houses
Our guide offered some theories for this peculiar practice (since it isn’t found on any of the surrounding islands). He said “perhaps all the fishermen were drunk when coming back to the island, and in the fog, they had a hard time identifying their house. So they painted each a different one. Or maybe, it is so foggy in the winter, they had to tell the island apart from others somehow.” But we’ve still got a healthy dose of skepticism that either of these is right.
Like Venice, many of the streets are actually canals
And, we’ve noticed in our time in Italy that leaning towers are far from being unique to Pisa. May be the drunk man theory isn’t so far off the mark…
Over the course of an hour, we walked around, trying to capture as much of this picturesque place as we could. Masha grew an obsession with window flower pots.
After a very rapid survey of the island (not so hard as it’s less than half a mile across) and its lace stores — a specialty there — we re-boarded our boat to proceed to the next *urano island
Our visit to Murano, the glass-making island was brief, but chock full of interesting knowledge. Turns out that, in the old days, the master glass makers from the 10+ factories on the island, were forbidden from leaving it, lest they share their secrets with outsiders. Beautiful blown glass was for Venice to own! Today, though, only five factories (and their gift shops) remain, as people continue to leave the island in search of variety and a different life (a phenomenon shared by all of Italy).
Landing on the island, we were quickly ushered into a glass workshop at one of these said factories into our “VIP” seats. We were taught about the ovens (which take days to warm up and cool down because of how HOT they are) and about how quickly a master has to work with a piece of glass (1 minute for a sculpture before the glass cools down to the point of being inflexible).
And over the course of 15-20 minutes, watched this master glass blower silently perform absolute magic in front of our eyes
It was fascinating… and yet, with all the beauty we saw, my favorite picture from the trip might just be this metal sculpture on the first island we visited, which housed an old Franciscan monastery made famous for being visited for a month by St Francis of Asissi. Peace amongst people is definitely the way to go.
