Lio Piccolo Site Features

The causeway road

The route out from Treporti, running on embankments with fishing valleys on one side and open salt marsh on the other. In places the lagoon is on both sides of the tarmac, and this is most of why people come.

The valli da pesca

Shallow basins closed off by low banks and sluices, worked for fish since the Middle Ages and still in use. They are private, and best seen from the road.

Palazzo Boldù

The eighteenth-century country house of the Venetian family that held these fishing valleys, standing in the hamlet's small square with its church.

The birds

Herons, egrets, avocets and waders on the valli and barene, with large numbers on passage in spring and autumn. Binoculars are worth carrying.

Lio Piccolo sits in the northern Venetian lagoon, on reclaimed and partly natural ground between Treporti and the open lagoon toward Torcello and Burano.

The defining features are the valli da pesca -- large shallow basins separated from the lagoon by low earth banks and controlled by sluices -- and the barene, the salt marshes cut by tidal channels that make up the lagoon's natural habitat.

Everything is flat and at or barely above sea level. The horizon is water, reeds, embankments and sky, with Burano's leaning campanile and Torcello's tower visible across the water to the west.

The birdlife is the reason the landscape matters: herons, egrets, avocets, waders, and large numbers on passage in spring and autumn.