The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

gatekeeper might do the trick if he’s not feeling harassed or if you can convince
him of an unquenchable interest in Palladian architecture.
The little harbour on the other side of the church was expanded during the second
French occupation of 1806–15, when Napoleon decided to accord the island
the status of a free port, in emulation of the tariff-free port of Trieste. A professor of
architecture at the Accademia designed the two diminutive lighthouses in 1813.
the southern islands
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La Giudecca
La Giudecca
In the earliest records of Venice the chain of islets now called La Giudecca was
known as Spina Longa, a name clearly derived from its shape. The modern name
might refer to the Jews (Giudei) who lived here from the late thirteenth century
until their removal to the Ghetto, but is most likely to originate with the two
disruptive noble families who in the ninth century were shoved into this district
to keep them out of mischief (giudicati means “judged”). Before the Brenta River
became the prestigious site for summer abodes, La Giudecca was where the
wealthiest aristocrats of early Renaissance Venice built their villas. Michelangelo,
self-exiled from Florence in 1529, consoled himself in the gardens of this island,
traces of which remain on its south side. The most extensive of La Giudecca’s surviving
private gardens, the so-called Garden of Eden (at the end of the Rio della
Croce), is bigger than any other in Venice – larger even than the public Giardini
Papadopoli, at the head of the Canal Grande. Its name refers not to its paradisical
properties but to a certain Mr Eden, the English gardener who planted it.
Giudecca was also the city’s industrial inner suburb: Venice’s public transport
boats used to be made here; an asphalt factory and a distillery were once neighbours
on the western end; and the matting industry, originating in the nineteenth century,
kept going until 1950. However, the present-day island is a potent emblem of Venice’s
loss of economic self-sufficiency in the twentieth century. In the mid-1990s the
clock and watch firm Junghans, one of the city’s major employers for half a century,
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