Murano governed itself for most of its history. It was politically autonomous between the 7th and 12th centuries and again from the 14th to the 19th, ruled by a podesta, with its own laws and its own council, and it kept a separate municipal administration until it was absorbed into the Comune di Venezia in 1923 (Bertocchi & Ferri, 2021, p. 186; Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 1).
That is the part of Murano the glass showrooms leave out. The island is an agglomerate of seven islands joined by bridges, 1.2 kilometres north-east of central Venice, and it now holds about 4,300 people on roughly 1.17 square kilometres (Bertocchi & Ferri, 2021, p. 186). At the height of the furnace trade in the 15th and 16th centuries it held almost 30,000, with sixteen churches and a cathedral, academies, botanical gardens and two annual glass fairs (ibid., p. 187). This page follows the community rather than the product: what self-government actually covered, how the island emptied, what the fall of the Republic took away, and what Murano residents say about living there now.
Did Murano govern itself?
Yes, for most of its recorded history. Murano was politically autonomous between the 7th and 12th centuries, and again from the 14th to the 19th, probably because of its importance in the lagoon. It was ruled by a podesta, the chief magistrate, and it had its own laws and its own council (Bertocchi & Ferri, 2021, p. 186).
The interruption in the middle is instructive. In 1171 the island was annexed to the sestiere of Santa Croce in Venice. That created social tensions, and the result was a return to civil independence in 1275 (ibid., p. 186). Self-government survived the Republic itself. The diocese of Torcello, which had moved its seat to a Gothic palace on Murano in 1689, was suppressed in 1805, and the palace passed to the Patriarchate of Venice, which sold it in 1840 to the Comune di Murano, whose town hall it became (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 1).
The end came in stages. Bertocchi and Ferri place the loss of self-government under Austrian imperial rule in the nineteenth century (2021, p. 186); the museum that occupies that same palace dates the municipal merger precisely, to 1923, when Murano entered the Comune di Venezia and the city acquired both the building and its museum (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 1). The two accounts describe different things, administrative subordination and formal amalgamation, decades apart.
How many people lived on Murano?
Almost 30,000 in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the furnace trade was at its height. The island then had sixteen churches and a cathedral, palaces, schools, scientific, artistic and literary academies, botanical gardens, many shops, and two annual and highly popular glass fairs (Bertocchi & Ferri, 2021, p. 187, drawing on Zanetti, 1866).
The comparison with the present is stark. Murano now holds about 4,300 people on roughly 1.17 square kilometres (ibid., p. 186). The municipal figures the same study uses put the resident population at 4,294, of whom 3,845 were aged 15 or over (ibid., pp. 192-193, citing Comune di Venezia, 2017). That is roughly a seventh of the island's early modern peak, on the same ground.
The decline is not only historical. Murano's population fell by 10 per cent in the ten years between 2007 and 2017, the same decade in which the historic centre of Venice lost 11 per cent (ibid., p. 188). Writing in 1861, when the island was still a separate commune, the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti said Murano had already lost the greater part of its population along with a large number of its churches, its monasteries, its palaces, its gardens, its seminaries and its libraries (Zanetti, 1861).
Mirrors, beads and chandeliers: separate trades on one island
The furnaces were never a single occupation. Mirrors were made on Murano by complex procedures from the 16th century onwards and enjoyed great fame throughout the 18th, with rich frames faced in enamelled or engraved glass, the engraving often running across the reflecting surface itself (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 7).
Beads were a different business with a different workforce. Conteria beads, monochrome and very small, drawn industrially from thin pierced canes, are documented on Murano from the 14th century; rosetta beads, made from composite pierced canes of several coloured layers, were invented in the 15th century by Marietta Barovier, daughter of Angelo; lamp-worked beads date from the 17th century (ibid., p. 9). The bead trade had its own named crafts, among them the paternostreri, who cut pierced cane into cylinders and rounded them hot in metal trays called ferrazze (ibid., p. 15).
Chandeliers were a third line, and a deliberate rescue. Giuseppe Briati (1686-1772), opposed by his own fellow islanders, acquired the secrets of Bohemian glass, reworked them to Venetian taste, and invented the many-armed crystal chandelier; he was exceptionally permitted to open a factory in Venice itself, where he also made carved mirrors and frames (ibid., p. 7). The brothers Bertolini had obtained the exclusive right to gold decoration from the Republic in 1739 (ibid., p. 6).
What the fall of the Republic in 1797 did to Murano
The Republic of Venice ceased to exist in 1797, and Murano then lived through a long period of crisis (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, pp. 1, 9). The crisis was double: the end of the state that had protected the glass monopoly, and competition from Bohemian glass produced in the Austro-Hungarian empire and preferred by the fashion of the day (ibid., p. 9).
The suppressions that followed removed much of the island's built fabric. On 22 July 1810 six more churches were taken at Murano, among them Santa Maria degli Angeli, whose attached monastery was definitively suppressed; about a hundred women were living there, from boarding pupils to nuns too infirm or too old to cross the threshold (Zanetti, 1863, p. 113). Zanetti's judgement on the policy was blunt: pauperism and depopulation were its principal results, along with considerable damage to the arts and sciences (ibid.).
His 1861 account names some of what went: the seminary founded by bishop Giustinian, the convent of San Bernardo, the monastery of San Mattia, the Corner and Vendramin palaces, and the abbey of San Cipriano, left as rubble. What fourteen centuries had built, he wrote, was destroyed within a few decades (Zanetti, 1861). Through all of it, bead-making was the only branch of the glass trade to stay flourishing on the island (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 9).
The archive of 1861 and the island's own history
The response to that loss came from the island's own administration. The Museo del Vetro began in 1861 on the initiative of Antonio Colleoni, then mayor of Murano, and the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti, a student of the glass art, with the idea of founding an archive of evidence on the history and life of the island (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 1).
Zanetti's own pamphlet of that year sets out the plan and the motive. The municipal Deputation, he records, had complained that many important historical documents lay forgotten, others scattered, others close to perishing under the rubble, and that it needed them to reclaim rights for the commune; a decree from the imperial lieutenancy opened the archives to him. The collection was to go into a room of the municipal palace and, in time, be divided between two rooms: an archive of parchments, manuscripts and books, and a small museum of paintings, commemorative coins and glasswork (Zanetti, 1861).
The museum soon overtook the archive, thanks to numerous donations of old and contemporary glass from the Murano furnaces, which had begun working intensively again in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1862 Zanetti attached a school to the museum, where glassmakers studied drawing and the historic glass kept there. After the 1923 annexation the collections were reordered in 1932 by Giulio Lorenzetti and Nino Barbantini and enlarged from other Venetian civic holdings (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2020, p. 1).
What is it like to live on Murano now?
Glassmaking is still the island's main economic function, and Murano is the only remaining active industrial centre in the Venetian lagoon. The industry is in a prolonged crisis, attributed to infrastructural limits, high production costs, lack of generational turnover, and competition from low-cost imitation products from Asian producers, which in turn creates employment and housing problems. Some historic furnaces have been converted into accommodation (Bertocchi & Ferri, 2021, p. 188).
Residents were asked directly. A questionnaire circulated on the island in September 2018, online, door to door and through the local newspaper, collected 579 responses, about 15 per cent of the population over 18 (ibid., p. 192). Of those who worked on Murano, 14.70 per cent worked in glass production (ibid., p. 193).
The answers point at daily life rather than at tourism statistics. Residents reported difficulty finding a house to rent or buy, mostly because of high prices, and a widespread sense that public and private services and recreational activities were missing; they asked for the Glass Museum to serve the island practically, with teaching and research, rather than standing only as a tourist attraction and a symbol of custodianship (ibid., p. 199). Their deeper worries were depopulation, the closure of furnaces and the abandonment of unused spaces (ibid., p. 200). The authors conclude that Murano is less seriously affected than Venice, and that the situation is not irreversible (ibid., pp. 186, 200).
