Today we headed down to the water's edge just along from the Doge's Palace for the start of today's journey.
We were on a day trip to two nearby islands.
The first one was Murano and is nearest to Venice. For nearly 800 years it has been the home of specialist glass makers. They originally lived in Venice but around 1281 it was decided to move all of them to a smaller nearby island to protect Venice from the risk of fire.
Most of the Venetian buildings were made of wood, and this was obviously quite a major risk when each glass blower works with a furnace that burns for 24 hours a day at around 1,200 degrees centigrade.
We watched a glass making display and then went into the showroom where most of the beautiful pieces cost many thousands of euros. They did have a room for smaller items, but they were well out of our price range too.
It was a good visit though, and then we got back on our boat and on to Burano.
Burano is famous for it's brightly coloured little houses and in the past also for fishing and lace making.
Most people visit to see the buildings now, and we were no exception.
Unfortunately it was not sunny today so the photos don't really show how nice it was.
One surprising fact we learnt is that the population is decreasing and that most of the existing people are over the age of 80, so the island may be very different in a few years time.
This is also true of Venue where the population has dropped massively over the past 20 or 30 years and is still dropping as people convert their houses to Airbnbs. (We stayed in a hotel for the record.)
Most of the people now live in the north of Venice which is not as touristy as the rest of it, and we went for a walk there this afternoon.
This is a church which shows the original brick flooring that was common over the whole of Venice until a couple of hundred years ago when it was upgraded to stone in the fancier areas of the city.
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