History of Burano Lace-Making

What is punto in aria, the Venetian needle lace?

Punto in aria means points in the air. The work is done with a needle and thread on a parchment or vellum pattern, with no woven cloth underneath and no bobbins to carry the threads. When the stitching is finished it is cut free of the parchment and stands on its own. The nineteenth-century lace historian Ernest Lefébure identified the French point en vélin, needlepoint worked on a vellum pattern and made at Alençon for fifty years before 1665, as the same thing the Italians called punto in aere (Lefébure, 1888, p. 214).

Burano's own point is a later refinement, a needle lace worked on a ground of regular meshes. Lefébure records that the island gave its name to a lace with a meshed ground, and that the outlines of its ornaments, like those of all late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Venetian laces with meshed grounds, are single threads barely visible to the eye (Lefébure, 1888, p. 232). A Belgian survey of 1902 describes the square form of those meshes and says the Burano workers executed them with a fineness nobody else matched (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 16).

When lace-making reached Burano

Venetian lace is older than Burano's share in it. Laces were exported from Venice to England as early as 1483 and used at the coronation of Richard III (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 8). Venice published the patterns that spread the technique: a Venetian publisher issued a book of cut and knotted stitches in 1543 and added li punti in aere to his edition of 1558, having said nothing of them before (Lefébure, 1888, pp. 191-192). The school's 1897 history counted no fewer than fifteen such books printed in Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 8).

The island enters the record later. The same history traces patrician patronage from Dandola, wife of Doge Pasquale Malipiero, in the fifteenth century to a second dogaressa about a hundred and fifty years afterwards, Morosina Morosini, wife of Doge Marino Grimani, who stood at the head of the noblewomen taking an interest in the craft. It is at that point, the start of the seventeenth century, that the industry is said to have begun establishing itself on Burano (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 9).

Accounts giving this dogaressa a workshop of 130 women are widely repeated. None of the sources fetched for this page supports that figure. Lefébure mentions Morosina Morosini once, as the subject of a Venetian portrait showing fine guipure at the neck (Lefébure, 1888, p. 225).

Louis XIV, Colbert and the Point de France

French competition is why Venetian lace became a political story. By the seventeenth century Venice had the trade in fine needlepoint lace to itself, and the returns from the French court were large enough to worry Paris (Lefébure, 1888, p. 211). An exclusive privilege dated 5 August 1665, running ten years, with a subsidy of 36,000 livres, went to a company whose main office and shop opened at the hôtel de Beaufort in Paris (Lefébure, 1888, p. 212). Lace from the chosen towns, among them Alençon, Reims, Sedan, Arras and Aurillac, was all sold as Points de France, and the company brought in foreign workers at the king's expense (Lefébure, 1888, p. 213). Three years in, the venture was paying a dividend of 30 per cent (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 15).

How many Venetian women went is disputed, and neither figure is about Burano. Lefébure cites Voltaire for thirty workers from Venice and two hundred from Flanders (Lefébure, 1888, p. 213). The Burano school's own history instead says nearly two hundred Venetian women were drawn to France in succession to teach the craft, and that the privileged workshop at Reims began with six of them (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 16). The claim that about 200 Burano lace-makers were induced to move in 1665 appears in neither.

Why Burano lace almost disappeared

The craft followed the Republic down. The 1897 history puts it plainly: the political decline of Venice brought the decline of the lace art, which then died out altogether, and the industry survived only on Burano, and there only in a languishing state, until 1845 (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 12). The Belgian survey of 1902 reports the same collapse in all three Italian centres where lace had been strongest, Venice, Genoa and Milan, around the middle of the nineteenth century, and says that by about 1872 the Burano craft had fallen away completely (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 3).

Machine lace was the other pressure. By the nineteenth century imitation lace was pouring out of the factories of Nottingham and Calais in volume, and the handmade trade defined itself against it (Hopkin, 2025, p. 31).

What survived on Burano in 1872 was one person's memory. The Belgian survey and the school's own account agree that a single elderly woman, known as Cencia Scarpariola, still knew the old Burano point, and that by then she could work it without being able to teach it (Verhaegen, 1902, pp. 3 and 5; Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 21).

The Burano lace school of 1872

The trigger was a hard winter. The lagoon froze in the winter of 1872 and took away the island's only livelihood, and some families came close to starving (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, pp. 19-20; Hopkin, 2025, p. 35). A public appeal raised funds, with the King and the Pope setting the example, and concerts and performances were organised in Venice. Half the money was handed out at once and the rest set aside to teach the island a trade (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 20; Verhaegen, 1902, pp. 4-5). A first plan to make fishing nets failed, because the fishermen already made their own (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 20).

Countess Andriana Marcello, lady-in-waiting to Crown Princess Margherita, took charge (Hopkin, 2025, p. 35). She had Cencia Scarpariola teach the mayor's daughter-in-law, who studied how the old woman worked and then passed it on to eight girls, and that was the start of the school (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 5). The princess, later Queen of Italy, gave her patronage and worked with the countess on recovering punto in aere and point de rose by unpicking old pieces to see how they were made (Verhaegen, 1902, pp. 5-6). A small capital was raised and the first floor of an old palace on the island was bought to house the school (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 5).

What the school's own books show about pay and output

The school kept registers and the 1902 survey published them. In 1878 it had 250 names enrolled, 130 women supplying actual work and net sales of 21,244.05 lire. By 1899 both the enrolled and the working numbers had reached 500 and net sales 119,518.48 lire; in 1901 the figures were 450, 450 and 111,648.11 lire (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 17). Hopkin puts the school at about eight hundred women and girls by the turn of the century, which is larger than the registers and probably counts the wider circle of homeworkers (Hopkin, 2025, p. 35).

Pay was by the piece and settled monthly. About 80 per cent of the selling price of a piece went to the woman who made it, which came to roughly one lira for eight hours for an ordinary worker and up to 1 lira 50 for ten hours for the best; the survey's author met one exceptional worker who had earned 800 lire in a year (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 10). A mutual aid society was founded among the pupils in 1896 with 2,000 francs of capital in shares (Verhaegen, 1902, p. 11).

The school was not universally welcome. Hopkin records constant conflict between it and lace-makers who declared themselves independent of it, and cites an anthropologist's finding that women on the island remembered the school as exploitative and authoritarian (Hopkin, 2025, pp. 39 and 53).

Burano Lace Museum: what the collection holds

The Lace Museum occupies the building the school used. It is the historic palace of the Podestà of Torcello on Piazza Galuppi, and it housed the Burano Lace School from 1872 to 1970 (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026). In 1978 the city, the provincial authorities, the chamber of commerce and the tourist boards joined the Andriana Marcello Foundation in a Consortium for Burano Lace, which the museum describes as its own beginning (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

The collection is laid out on the first floor in four parts: the origins to the sixteenth century, the seventeenth to eighteenth century, the nineteenth to twentieth century, and the Burano Lace School of 1872 to 1970. The pieces run from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and the rooms hold glasses, clothes, books, drawings and paintings alongside the lace. Lace-makers work in the museum during opening hours, and a short film on the ground floor is subtitled in English (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026).

What the school produced was wider than the island's own point. Its 1897 list covers needle points of Burano, Venice in relief, Venice tagliato a fogliame, Venice rose point, Argentan, Alençon, old Brussels and England (Scuola Merletti di Burano, 1897, p. 23).