“Detourism: La newsletter di Venezia”, the official Town of Venice Tourism Office Newsletter, takes us to a special tour of the islands of the Lagoon of Venice! Enjoy your reading!
Touring the outlying islands: Murano and Burano.
The outlying islands in the northern part of the Venetian Lagoon are undoubtedly the best known of the lagoon archipelago. A must is the island of Murano, famous worldwide for the art of glass blowing, whose secrets have been handed down for more than seven hundred years in the furnaces on the island. The art of glass in Venice has ancient origins, and since 1291 it has all been concentrated on Murano for the prevention of fire incidents. Today there are still active furnaces where expert glass craftsmen create unique pieces of art, certified by the Vetro Artistico Murano trademark.
The world’s largest collection of Murano glass can be admired in the Glass Museum, which traces the history of Murano glass, through the exhibition of pieces produced from the fourteenth century to the present day. The Murano Glass Museum is also on Google Arts & Culture with over 50 high-resolution images of some of the most representative works of the collection.
A pleasant boat ride leads further north in the lagoon to the colorful island of Burano, with the pastel-painted houses and the famous leaning bell tower.
In ancient times, fishing was the most common activity on the island; even today there is a local fishermen’s cooperative that organizes fishing tourism trips in the lagoon. But Burano has a long-established tradition of needle-lace making. Burano needle lace is still hand-sewn, and is worked with a needle and a single thread in a succession of buttonhole stitches in varying degrees of tightness and in straight lines that support further stitches. Venice laces are made in one of two techniques, needle lace and bobbin lace. Bobbin lace, typical of Pellestrina, an island south of Venice, is made by weaving threads that unroll from special spools that are called fuselli (bobbins) on a round cushion called tombolo. Needle lace, in particular, originated in Renaissance Venice, and today is recognized as one of the most ancient and prestigious traditional artform in the lagoon. It now boasts place on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Over two hundred rare and precious lace works are on display at the Burano Lace Museum. In the mornings, visitors can watch the lace-makers at work.
You can take a tour of the Glass Museum and the Lace Museum with a single ticket. For those still looking for inspiration, here is the Museums of the islands’ video.
Find out all about #EnjoyRespectVenezia
[source: La newsletter di Venezia, N° 50/2019 del 12.12.2019]
[picture: Kasa Fue, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
We are proud to publish some selected contents of such newsletter (see previous post: “Detourism for the Up and Down the Bridges“). On our website, in several episodes, we will only present some samples (see all posts in our archive page “Detourism Newsletter“), but the invitation addressed to all the friends of the Up and Down the Bridges is to subscribe to the newsletter directly.
Special thanks to the Councillor for Tourism for having enthusiastically welcomed this new important collaboration between TGS Eurogroup and the Tourism Office of the Town of Venice and for giving us the precious opportunity to publish on the pages of this blog some extracts from this newsletter, both in Italian and in English.
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Discover all the itineraries of #Detourism to explore a different Venice, promoted as part of the #EnjoyRespectVenezia awareness campaign of the Town of Venice.
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Sustainable Tourism Service of the Town of Venice:
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