In 1291 the Venetian Republic ordered every glass furnace moved off Rialto and onto Murano, ostensibly to spare the city from fire. The relocation also sealed a monopoly. Murano's masters were forbidden to leave; those who did risked assassination. From that confinement came cristallo, the near-colourless glass perfected by Angelo Barovier in the fifteenth century, and a craft vocabulary — filigrana, millefiori, avventurina — still spoken in the furnaces today. A murano and burano boat tour traces that geography of exile across open water. Burano lies roughly seven kilometres further north, a fishing settlement of four small islands stitched together by bridges. Its houses are painted in saturated blocks of ochre, cobalt, oxblood and pistachio. The convention is old and practical: colour identified a family's home through lagoon fog, and repainting still requires municipal approval of the shade. The Campanile of San Martino leans visibly out of true, a tilt caused by settling foundations in soft alluvial mud. Nearby, the Museo del Merletto preserves punto in aria needle lace, a technique developed here in the sixteenth century and once traded across European courts. Beyond Burano sits Torcello, settled before Venice itself by mainlanders fleeing Lombard incursions. The Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, consecrated in 639 and rebuilt in 1008, holds a Byzantine mosaic of the Last Judgement and a golden Madonna set against bare gold tesserae. Malaria and a silting harbour emptied the island; fewer than a dozen residents remain where thousands once lived. These three islands matter now because they preserve what central Venice has largely surrendered to tourism: working trades. Furnaces still fire at over 1,000 degrees Celsius. Lace-makers still work by hand, though few remain. Venice lagoon island cruises exist because the distances are impractical on foot and the shallow channels demand local navigation, marked by wooden bricole driven into the seabed. Burano itself charges no entrance fee — 0 EUR, free entry, with no general admission required to set foot on the island. The address is simply Burano, 30142 Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy. The island is open around the clock, 00:00–23:59 every day of the week, because it is a place where people live rather than a monument that closes. Operators structure a murano and burano boat tour around that openness, sequencing glassblowing demonstrations, lace workshops and, on longer itineraries, the Torcello basilica into a single crossing of the northern lagoon.