Caorle Old Town Site Features

The centre is a tight grid of low two- and three-storey houses in plastered brick, built close together along narrow lanes for shelter from the sea wind.

The painted plaster is the defining feature: strong, flat, saturated colours, repainted regularly, with no attempt at architectural decoration beyond the colour itself.

Rio Terrà is the main axis, noticeably wider and straighter than the lanes around it because it follows a filled canal rather than a building line.

The cathedral and its round campanile stand at the centre of the grid and are by a long way the oldest and most substantial structures in it.

There is no monumental architecture here beyond the church. What makes the centre worth walking is the consistency of the ordinary fabric.

The painted houses

The reason most visitors come, and best in the lanes off Rio Terrà rather than on the main street itself.

Rio Terrà

The filled-in canal that is now the main street -- and the explanation for why it is shaped the way it is.

The cathedral and campanile

The eleventh-century church at the centre, with its cylindrical bell tower.

The fish market and quay

Early in the morning, the working remnant of the town that all this was built for.

The old centre occupies the slightly raised ground of a promontory between two beaches, with the open Adriatic to the north and the Caorle lagoon immediately behind it inland.

The whole site is barely above sea level and entirely flat, and the surrounding land -- now farmland -- was marsh and lagoon until twentieth-century reclamation.

That position, on the last dry ground between sea and wetland, is why the settlement is where it is.