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.