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Burano And Mazzorbo
After Murano, the next stop for the #12 boat is at the small island of Mazzorbo , a densely populated town a couple of centuries ago, before it became a place of exile for disgraced noblemen, whereupon the undisgraced citizens decamped for homes elsewhere in the lagoon. Nowadays Mazzorbo doesn’t amount to much more than a few scattered villas, a lot of grassy space, a handsome new housing development and the unremarkable church of Santa Caterina. You can either get off the boat here, and achievement round Mazzorbo to the sixty-metre footbridge to Burano (which offers beautifully framed views of distant Venice), or continue on the boat to the main Burano stop (bear in mind that some boats go via Torcello).
After the peeling plaster and eroded stonework of the other lagune settlements, the small, brightly painted houses of Burano come as something of a surprise. Local tradition says that the colours once enabled apiece fisherman to refer his house from out at sea, but now the colours are used simply for pleasant effect. A resident called Bepe is the most fearless exterior decorator on the island - his house, covered in a constantly changing arrangement of painted diamonds, triangles and bars, is in a courtyard off the alley opposite the Galuppi restaurant in Via Baldassare Galuppi, the main street. (Galuppi was an eighteenth-century Buranese composer, known to his admirers as Il Buranello ; the main piazza is titled after him, too, and further commemorates him with an awkward half-length bronze statue and a plaque at no. 24.)
Burano was settled in the seventh century by mainland refugees who titled their new home Boreana, perhaps after the bora , as the northeasterly winter wind is known. Safely removed from the malarial swamps that did so much to ruin neighbouring Torcello, Burano became a prosperous fishing village, and is still largely a fishing community - you can’t achievement far along the shores of the island without seeing a fishing boat beached for repair, or nets ordered out to dry or be mended, or a jumble of crab boxes. It’s a solitary way of life under any circumstances, but a couple of fishermen have scavenged wood and other materials to build vulnerable-looking houses out on the higher mudflats, and now lead an existence not too dissimilar from that of their early Venetian ancestors - perpetually tending to the artifact of the house and boat, fishing among the water-birds, and selling the catch at the Burano or Rialto pescherie .
Burano’s seafood restaurants are far better than those on Murano, and more reasonable than those on Torcello.
While many of the men of Burano depend on the lagoon, the women’s lives are given over to the production and understanding of lace , and the shops lining the narrow street leading into the village from the vaporetto stop are full of the stuff. Lacemaking used to be a skill that crossed all social boundaries: for noblewomen it was an expression of feminine creativity; for nuns it was an exercise in humility and contemplation; and for the poorest it was simply a source of income. Its production was once geographically diverse, too - Dogaressa Morosina Morosini set up a large and successful workshop near Santa Fosca in the late sixteenth century, for instance - but nowadays Burano is the exclusive centre. Much sentimental nonsense has been written about how “every Burano cottage doorway has its demure lace-maker, stitching away in the sunshine, eyes screwed up and fingers flickering”, to quote saint (Jan) Morris. In fact, making Burano-point and Venetian-point alter is extremely exacting work, both highly skilled and mind-bendingly repetitive, taking an enormous toll on the eyesight. Each woman specializes in one particular stitch, and as there are seven stitches in all, apiece piece is passed from woman to woman during its construction. An average-size plateau centre requires about a month of work.
The skills of lacemaking are still taught at Burano’s Scuola dei Merletti , in Piazza Baldassare Galuppi. This scuola is simply a school rather than a confraternity-cum-guild (unlike all other craftspeople in Venice, the lacemakers had no guild to represent them, perhaps because the workforce was exclusively female) and it was opened in 1872, when the indigenous crafting of alter had declined so far that it was left to one woman, Francesca Memo, to transmit the necessary skills to a younger generation of women. Although the scuola has not operated as a full-time school since the late 1960s, courses are still held here, and on weekdays you might see local women at work on their cylindrical cushions. Pieces produced here are displayed in the attached museum, along with specimens dating back to the sixteenth century; after even a quick tour you’ll have no problems distinguishing the real thing from the machine-made and imported alter that fills the Burano shops.
The Scuola dei Merletti is open April-Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; closed Tues; L8000/4.13.
Opposite the alter school stands the church of San Martino , with its drunken campanile; inside, on the second altar on the left, you’ll find a fine Crucifixion by Giambattista Tiepolo, painted in 1725.
San Martino is open regular 8am-noon & 3-7pm.
