Mazzorbo Site Features

Santa Caterina is the island's architecture: a fourteenth-century church in brick, with a plain gabled front, a ship's-keel timber ceiling inside, and a detached campanile. Its bell of 1318 still hangs there.

The Ponte Longo, the long wooden footbridge to Burano, is the island's other structure of note -- a simple timber span across the channel, and the only land link.

The houses along the single fondamenta are low and rendered, some painted in the Burano manner but less insistently, and a group of modern social housing from the 1980s sits behind them in a deliberate pastel palette.

The walled vineyard at Venissa is enclosed by old brick walls with a surviving bell tower inside it -- the remains of a monastery that stood here before the island emptied.

Mazzorbo sits in the northern lagoon, west of Burano and south of Torcello, low and flat like everything here.

Most of its surface is cultivated: walled orchards, vegetable plots, vines and open grass, divided by ditches. This is what the northern lagoon islands looked like before they emptied.

Its edges are quays on the Burano side and salt marsh elsewhere, with tidal channels running out into open shallow water.

From the western side the lagoon opens toward Venice, with Torcello's campanile visible to the north.