Burano The Jewel of the Venetian Lagoon Burano, leaning almost like the tower of Pisa. Burano is an overpopulated islet where the women make magnificent lace...".With these words spoken by Colonel Cantwell when he first espies Burano on his journey from Trieste, Hemingway describes the island in one of his most famous novels.More or less the same sight had welcomed the refugees driven from Altinum by the barbarians from the North sweeping across the Veneto plains. The island offered them shelter from the pillage and brutality of the many waves of invaders. And, maybe, at least according to some scholars, the drawl still characterizing the sing-song dialect of Burano, is the last trace of thelanguage spoken by the ancient citizens of Altinum.Yet these peoples did not come to an entirely deserted and barren land. Those who sought refuge on the lagoon islands in different moments from Padua, Oderzo, and Aquileia, found small scattered settlements throughout the lagoon area.Archaeological evidence has shown that the early settlers had been there since before the Roman colonization. They were fishermen, salt gatherers, farmers tilling the scarce emerged land.Cassiodoro's much quoted letter to the maritime tribunes (537) mentions peoples well versed in navigation. These could only be the original lagoon-dwellers, who had lived on those shores for generations, in close symbiosis with the brackish waters where rivers meet the sea.From Venice, instead, Burano is hardly visible. To catch a glimpse of the island, you have to get to the farthest end of Fondamenta Nuove, and if you look towards the northern lagoon, past the island of San Michele, past the island of Murano, about nine kilometers northward, you can see the island on the horizon, almost one in the distance with the nearby islands of Mazzorbo and Torcello, to which it is linked by centuries of shared history.One of the earliest records documenting the name of Burano is the famous "Pactum Lotharii". This treaty signed by Doge Pietro Tradonico and Emperor Lothario enumerates, among other things, the areas inhabited by the Venetici under the Doge's rule. Burano is listed, as are Rialto, Chioggia, Malamocco, Olivolo and many more. However secluded, distant and off-the-beaten-path as it may appear today, Burano has always been closely connected to Venice, whose glorious past it has shared in good and bad times - it was occupied by French troops and then by the Austrians, and contributed its own heroes to the ill-fated 1848 revolution led by Daniele Manin. In 1866, it joined the kingdom of Italy together with the whole of Veneto, and became a township of the Municipality of Venice in 1923. The ancient layout of the town has been preserved through the centuries, developing over some smaller islets divided by the three main canals, Giudecca, Cavanella, Ponticello, and covering an area of 50 sq.km. There are very few modern houses, and even fewer monumental buildings. Cliché as it may sound, the impression one has when walking along the streets, some of them incredibly narrow, or along the fondamenta of its tiny canals, is that this is a miniature Venice. This does not detract from the charm and grace of this pretty and tidy island, it even adds to its appeal by explaining its diminutive size with the limited surface available, and the lack ofgrand or monumental civilian or religious buildings, apart from the Podesteria and the San Martino Cathedral.With the 1806 decrees, the French closed the church and monastery of San Mauro, the church and monastery of Saints Cipriano and Cornelio, the monastery of San Vito, and the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, all later demolished, as well as the Church of the Poor Clares, whose building still stands today. The Burano houses have their distant origin in the ancient lagoon casoni, or fishing lodges, buildings made of reeds and mud with thatched roofs, generally with a square plan, and no more than two or three-storey high. The homely Burano cottages stand side by side in long rows, following the gentle curve of the canals and, possibly, the exposure to the sunlight. In the past, a large kitchen occupied the ground floor, while the bedrooms were upstairs. The facades are brightly painted in primary colours, each house a different, personalized hue.
Sometimes the facade is painted in two completely different colours. Apparently, this picturesque riot of colours may is useful in defining property boundaries. On this point, we would like to mention the popular belief fathat ascribes the origin of the custom of painting the facades in different colours to the difficulty of recognizing one's house in the dark wen the fishermen returned from a night's fishing. Particulary interesting is the facade of the house called "Bepi sua" in via de la Gattolo, with geometrical patterns painted in bright oil colours. Reproduced on several postcards, it has become a tourist attraction and the pictures depicting it can even be seen in museum in the United StatesOne house, the one in which the painter Vellani Marchi lived, paradoxically has two facades painted in different colours. The buildings have all the architectural characteristics of popular architecture, and many still display the traditional "fogher", or hooded fireplace, projecting outside the outer walls. Work boats and pleasure craft bob gently on the canals, moored to poles or rings on the fondamenta, or quaysides. Many of the boats are still patterned after the old lagoon models, modified along the centuries by the Burano people to better suit their fishing techniques in the lagoon and the open sea. They go by such names as "schiopon", "sandolo da fossina", "sandolo bastardo", "cofano", "batela buranela", and "caorlina", and are built, together with many other traditional boats, in the "squeri", or boatyards, of the island. Burano has always had its own boatyards, as boats have an essential role in the life of this community. They were used not only by fishermen, but also by farmers working in the many vegetable gardens to carry their crops, or by the salt-gatherers when the salt basins were still operative, and are still employed today as fishing vessels both in the lagoon and in the open sea. Their shapes have been handed down through the centuries basically unchanged except for minor alteration due to specific working requirement. The Latin scholar Servius, in his commentary to Virgilius, mentioned the "Linies", the thin boats used by the peoples of the Veneto lagoons. But it for its was lace-making that the island became a byword starting from the 16th century.The mythical origins of this craft are narrated in the love lore of the island. A young crusader from Burano had left his beloved a beautiful seaweed as a token of his love. As time went by, the seaweed began to wilt, and the girl sought to preserve it by reproducing it by needlework on one of her father's fishing nets. Lace-making was a craft that the Serenissima valued very highly, but did not protect as much as the other industries, and many lace-makers emigrated to France, where they had been called to teach the French this painstaking art. Just to give you an idea of the importance this activity had in its heyday in the 16th and 17th century, more than one hundred manuals on the art of lace-making, rich in prints and illustrations, were printed in the Venetian presses in those two centuries. The industry languished in the last years of the Serenissima, and the decline continued after the fall of the Republic and during the French and Austrian occupations.After Venice had become part of the Kingdom of Italy, towards the end of the 19th century, the art was slowly resuscitated through the joint efforts of Countess Marcello and Paulo Fambri, and a lace school was opened in 1872.Burano can rightfully boast of another claim to fame: it is the birthplace of the celebrated composer Baldassarre Galluppi, whose monument stands at the centre of the main square. The twentieth century brought a spate of projects aimed at connecting the island to the mainland. In 1921, a trans-lagoon causeway was planned from the mainland to Venice, where an iron street was to go as far as Fondamenta Nuove, and then go on on a separate causeway to S.Erasmo, S.Francesco del Deserto, and to Burano, ending its isolation from the mainland.In another project, a suspended railway was supposed to connect Mestre to the Cavallino, with branches to Murano, Burano and S.Marta, and a line to Giudecca and Lido. A sub-lagoon metro system was then conceived to connect the mainland to Murano, Burano, Torcello and Treporti. Fortunately, all the plans fell through, and the island still lies in splendid isolation at the edge of the Torcello archipelago, steeped in an atmosphere and light that are not too different today from what it was when the first lagoon dwellers settled on the island.The light in Burano has a poignant beauty of its own. In presenting a collection of drawings of Burano by the painter Vellani Marchi, Orio Vergani spoke of the light of the island, defining Burano the island of light. It was this striking light that attracted several painters to the island in the early twentieth century. Here they found the ideal conditions for their art in the balance of colours, light, peacefulness, and gave the start to the movement called the "Burano school".In 1928 – 1930 there was a revival of landscape painting also among lagoon painters, and the Burano Award was inaugurated in the post-war period.Among the most celebrated painters in this current, we cannot fail to mention Carlo Dalla Zorza, Virgilio Guidi, Juti Ravenna, Luciano Gaspari, Fioravante Seibezzi, Virgilio Tramontin, Ilario Rossi, Remigio Barbaro from Burano, and many more that we have to leave out for lack of space. The meeting place of those artists was a trattoria. And in Burano, no visitor can complain about the fare of the local eating places. They all offer the traditional dishes based on a time-honoured cooking tradition that make ample use of the local fish and produce, the typical ingredients of the humble fishermen and farmers of the island, the harvest of the lagoon. Fresh produce from the vegetable gardens, the fish and seafood from the fishing valleys, the lagoon, and the sea. The food is simple but very tasty, and splendid in the simplicity of its preparation.Visitors to Venice usually stay for two or three days. And those days are so packed with things to do and see in the city that very few find the time to visit the islands. When they do, they go to Murano, much closer to Venice, and more attractive because of the lure of glassmaking.Making time to reach this fascinating island and nearby Torcello would instead reward the visitor with a unique experience.The noise of the boat engines, the queues of tourists from the package tours cannot detract from the beauty of these places. Here, very little has changed. The sights our eyes take in, and our soul will cherish, are more or less the same we would have seen in the distant past.The light, in winter as well as in summer, bathes the stones, the water, the grassland and the trees that emerge from the lagoon and imbues these apparently still and stagnant backwaters with life. Let us just stop a minute and we will see that there is a harmony, a balance to the whole environment. The current ripples the water as it rises with the tide, a dwarf heron hops in the mud of the shallows, a seagull glides weightlessly in the air. Farther away, boats are moored, people get off and on the vaporetto, and nearby, a group of women stop for a chat, their shopping bags forgotten for a moment on the ground next to them.Voices, sounds, the normalcy and relaxedness of a "confidential" world. We cannot miss the chance to savour it, even for an hour
Sometimes the facade is painted in two completely different colours. Apparently, this picturesque riot of colours may is useful in defining property boundaries. On this point, we would like to mention the popular belief fathat ascribes the origin of the custom of painting the facades in different colours to the difficulty of recognizing one's house in the dark wen the fishermen returned from a night's fishing.
Murano, Burano and S.Marta, and a line to Giudecca and Lido.