The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

stage to the sea front – the more or less hourly #11 bus goes down to Alberoni,
where it drives onto a ferry for the five-minute hop to Pellestrina; the 10km to
the southern tip of Pellestrina are covered by road, and then you switch from the
bus to a steamer for the 25-minute crossing to Chioggia. The entire journey takes
about eighty minutes and is covered by ACTV travel cards, but be sure to check
the timetable carefully at Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, because not every #11
goes all the way to Chioggia. The quickest way back to Venice is by bus from the
Duomo or Sottomarina to Piazzale Roma, but it’s a dispiriting drive, is only about
twenty minutes quicker than the island-hop route, and ACTV passes are not valid,
as this is an extra-urban bus service.
Malamocco and Pellestrina
The fishing village of Malamocco, about 5km into the expedition, is the successor
of the ancient settlement called Metamauco, which in the eighth century was
the capital of the lagoon confederation. In 810 the town was taken by Pepin, son
of Charlemagne, and there followed one of the crucial battles in Venice’s history,
when Pepin’s fleet, endeavouring to reach the islands of Rivoalto (forerunner of
Venice), became jammed in the mudbanks and was swiftly pounced upon. After
the battle the capital was promptly transferred to the safer islands of Rivoalto,
and in 1107 the old town was destroyed by a tidal wave. Rebuilt Malamocco’s
most appealing feature – the church’s scaled-down replica of the Campanile of San
Marco – can be seen without getting off the bus. Incidentally, Malamocco provides
one of the bloodier footnotes of later Venetian history – the Canal Orfano, off the
Malamocco shore, was the spot where some of those condemned by the Council of
Ten were bound, gagged, weighted and thrown overboard by the executioner. (If
you take the vaporetto to San Lazzaro you pass along a section of it.)
The most ferocious defenders of the lagoon in the war against Pepin came from
the small island of Poveglia, just off Malamocco. Once populous enough to have a
practically independent administration, it suffered greatly in the war against Genoa
(see p.228) and went into a steep decline immediately after, becoming little more
than a fort. For much of the last century it was a hospital island, but since the
closure of the hospital in the late 1960s it has been abandoned.
Fishing and the production of fine pillow-lace are the mainstays of life in the
village of Pellestrina, which is strung out along nearly a third of the 10km of
the next island. There’s one remarkable old structure here, but you get the best
view of it as the boat crosses to Chioggia. This is the Murazzi, the colossal walls
of Istrian boulders, 4km long and 14m thick at the base, which were constructed
at the sides of the Porto di Chioggia to protect Venice from the battering of the
sea. The maintenance of the water level in the lagoon has always been a preoccupation
of Venetian life: very early in the city’s development, for example, the five
gaps in the lidi (the Lido–Chioggia sandbars) were reduced to the present three
to strengthen the barrier against the Adriatic and to increase the dredging action
of the tides through the three remaining porti. In time a special state official, the
Magistrato alle Acque, was appointed to supervise the management of the lagoon,
and the Murazzi were the last major project undertaken by the Magistrato’s
department. Devised as a response to the increased flooding of the early eighteenth
century, the Murazzi took 38 years to build, and remained unbreached
from 1782, the year of their completion, until the flood of November 1966. In
recent years the beaches of Pellestrina have been widened and raised to lessen the
force of the action of the sea, but the biggest flood-prevention project involves
the installation of submergible floodgates at the inlets of the Lido, Malamocco
and Chioggia (see p.416).
the southern islands
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From the Lido to Chioggia
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