This week’s dream: a cruise around Venice’s outer islands
The Venetian lagoon is a “strange” and beautiful place, said Stanley Stewart in the FT, its archipelago of outer islands “peopled, so the old guidebooks say, with fishermen and madmen, romantics and hermits, busy gardeners and cloistered clerics”. You can explore it on vaporetti (public ferries), or, more lazily and luxuriously, on a riverboat such as the “stylish” S.S. La Venezia. Sea-going cruise ships were finally banned from Venice in August this year, but La Venezia is relatively small: it carries no more than 126 passengers. A week-long itinerary will take in Ferrara, Bologna, Venice (including a “remarkable” afterhours visit to St Mark’s Basilica), and several of the outer islands.
On San Servolo, the skulls of former inmates sit on shelves in the dissecting room of the old insane asylum, now a “dusty” museum with a terrace that commands a glorious view back to the Grand Canal. And on tiny San Lazzaro, where Byron worked on an English-Armenian dictionary in the winter of 1816, there is an Armenian monastery that houses a splendid collection of curios – an Egyptian mummy, a machine for making electric sparks, “racy” volumes of Oriental eroticism by Sir Richard Burton. With its huge fishing fleet, Chioggia is a “scruffy, workaday” place where you might sample seafood
cicchetti (tapas-like snacks) at a canalside bar. And although Burano, famed for its lace workshops, teems with tourists by day, it is wonderfully peaceful in the evenings.
Yet of all the islands, none can match the “spectral hold” of Torcello, which Ruskin called “the mother of Venice”. First settled in the sixth century AD – long before Venice itself – by refugees fleeing barbarian invaders on the mainland, it is a “sweet and melancholy” place, home to one of Italy’s loveliest buildings, the Byzantine basilica of Santa Maria Assunta; its nave is so covered in gold mosaics, the very air seems honey-coloured.
A week-long cruise starts from £2,199pp (uniworld.com).