---
node: spot_venice_murano
type: spot
slug: murano
destination: dest_venice
title: "Murano"
lead: "Murano is the island where Venice moved its glassworks in 1291, to keep the furnaces away from a city built of wood. The glassmakers were forbidden to leave on pain of death, and the craft has stayed here for seven centuries."
published: 2026-08-12
updated: 2026-08-12
image_file: spot_venice_murano.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lampadario_in_vetro_di_Murano_-_Ca%27_Rezzonico,_Venice.jpg"
image_author: "Didier Descouens"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

## Overview

The island is a small Venice, with its own canal, its own bridges and about four thousand residents. Its basilica, Santa Maria e San Donato, has a twelfth-century mosaic floor as good as anything in the city and a fraction of the visitors. Cheap imported glass sold as Murano is a long-standing problem, which is why the genuine workshops carry the consortium's trademark.

## Highlights

Watch a furnace demonstration — several workshops run them hourly and most are free — then buy, if at all, from a workshop that will show you the mark. The glass museum in the Palazzo Giustinian sets seven centuries of it in order and takes an hour. Vaporetto lines 4.1 and 4.2 run from Fondamente Nove in ten minutes; the free boats offered near San Marco end at a shop.