Venice Day Trips: Murano to Torcello
Heads up: some links here are affiliate links. Book or buy through them and we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only point you to things we would actually use.
Verona and Padua get most of the “day trip from Venice” search results, and neither one is on this page. Both belong to the Veneto mainland, its own separate trip with its own train timetable, so this page sticks to the three islands you can actually reach and return from inside a single lagoon day.
Murano: glass, and a sales pitch that comes with it
The closest island, roughly 10 to 15 minutes by vaporetto from Fondamente Nove, and famous for centuries of glassmaking. The free factory demonstrations that pull most visitors in are worth seeing, molten glass shaped by hand is genuinely impressive, but they’re a sales floor first and a craft demonstration second; treat the pitch that follows as expected, not a scam. For the bookable class version with real hands-on time, see our activities page.
Burano: the one that rewards slowing down
About 40 to 45 minutes by vaporetto from Fondamente Nove, or reached onward from Murano. Burano’s brightly painted houses and centuries-old lace-making tradition are well documented at the Lace Museum, but the island’s real strength is unhurried wandering rather than a rushed hour between boats. Of the three, this is the one worth carving out closer to half a day for. Compare Burano lace and island tours on Viator .
Torcello: the quiet one
A short additional hop from Burano, and the least visited of the three by a wide margin. The Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta holds some of the oldest Byzantine mosaics in the lagoon, set against a near-empty, almost rural landscape that’s a genuine contrast to the historic centre’s crowds. If escaping the crowds entirely is the point of the day, this is the pick.
Getting there, and the fee you won’t pay
All three islands are explicitly exempt from Venice’s day-visitor access fee, whichever calendar happens to be in force when you travel, a genuinely useful planning fact on its own. The public ACTV vaporetto, mainly Line 12, covers all three at roughly 40 to 60 minutes per hop, a single €9.50 ticket per ride, or a day pass once you’re past three rides. If you’d rather not juggle three separate boat schedules, a guided tour bundles all three with a glass-factory stop for a broadly comparable price, covered in full on our attraction tours page. Museum Pass Plus holders, at €50, also get Murano’s Glass Museum, Burano’s Lace Museum and Torcello’s own museum included as of 2026, worth factoring in if you’re museum-hopping anyway.
Verdict: if you only have time for one island, make it Burano for the wandering, and save Torcello for whenever you genuinely want to see no one else at all. Compare lagoon island tours on GetYourGuide if a single booked half-day beats piecing together vaporetto legs yourself. For the Veneto mainland day trips this page deliberately skips, that’s a separate trip best planned through the venice-italy family of guides, not rebuilt here. For the guided comparison in full, see Venice attraction tours .