This is the last in my series about the colourful Italian island of Burano.

I am not a street photographer and none of these shots would even begin to qualify as decent candid portraits, but they are the best I could manage, awkwardly trying not to be noticed as I furtively snatched an image or two.

I wonder what it is like living on a tiny island where every day the day trippers vastly outnumber the inhabitants.

Do the locals heave a hearty sigh of relief when the late afternoon’s long shadows see the departure of the last vaporetto and the colourful streets no longer echo with the babble of multiple foreign tongues?

Tourism and the sale of intricate lace, to tourists, are the principal/only industries on Burano so the relationship with the tourists must necessarily be one of polite encouragement.  Certainly we didn’t feel any animosity.  But it must be a strange existence.

Tourism websites are rather coy on the question of the origins of the tradition for colourful houses. They seem to agree that it began during the middle ages and had something to do with distinguishing dwellings from each other. Apparently the colours follow a well-established pattern and if one wants to paint one’s house one must apply to the government who will then provide a list of permitted colours.

I leave you with a few more shots of the colourful island.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets. (Charles Baudelaire)

The picture will have charm when each colour is very unlike the one next to it. (Leon Battista Alberti)

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration. (Marc Chagall)