A small island in the northern Venetian lagoon, approximately seven kilometres from Venice proper, renowned worldwide for its intensely coloured fishermen's houses and its centuries-old tradition of needle-lace production. The island's visual identity is defined by the practice of painting houses in vivid primary and secondary colours -- a tradition variously attributed to helping fishermen identify their homes through lagoon fog, to distinguishing property boundaries, or simply to local aesthet.....

The Museo del Merletto on the island of Burano in the northern Venetian lagoon documents the history and technique of Burano point lace, a needle-lace tradition that made this small fishing island one of the world's most important centres of luxury textile production from the sixteenth century onward. The museum occupies a building that formerly housed the lace-making school established in 1872 to revive a tradition that had nearly died out during the nineteenth century. The collection includes.....

A small archaeological and medieval art museum on the island of Torcello in the northern Venetian lagoon, housed in two historic buildings adjacent to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. The collection presents artefacts from the lagoon's earliest inhabited island, which served as the principal settlement of the Venetian lagoon from the fifth to the eleventh century before Venice itself rose to prominence and Torcello declined to the near-deserted state visitors find today. The Palazzo dell'A.....

The most ancient continuously inhabited island in the Venetian lagoon, settled from the fifth century by refugees fleeing barbarian invasions of the mainland, and the lagoon's dominant settlement until the ninth century when the rise of Venice on the Rialto islands drew population away. Today Torcello is home to fewer than a dozen permanent residents, its former urban fabric reduced to a single canal, a handful of buildings, and extensive archaeological remains scattered among wild vegetation an.....