Pellestrina Site Features

The murazzi are the architecture here, and they are a work of engineering rather than of decoration.

They are built as a stepped rampart of large Istrian limestone blocks, battered on the seaward face so that waves run up and lose their force rather than striking a vertical wall. The blocks are set in lime mortar, and the scale is closer to a fortification than to a sea defence as usually imagined.

Behind them the villages -- Santa Maria del Mare, San Pietro in Volta, Portosecco and Pellestrina -- are single- and two-storey houses in rendered brick, painted in strong flat colours as at Burano, strung in a line because the island gives no room to be anything else.

The island is so narrow in places that a single street carries everything, with the lagoon visible at one end of a side alley and the sea at the other.

Pellestrina is a barrier island between the Lido di Venezia to the north and Chioggia to the south, separating the Adriatic from the southern lagoon.

It is about eleven kilometres long and extremely narrow -- in the tightest stretches a hundred metres or less from sea to lagoon.

The seaward side is the murazzi and a narrow beach; the lagoon side is quays, moored fishing boats, mussel farms and open shallow water toward Venice.

Nothing on the island is more than a couple of metres above sea level, which is the entire reason the murazzi exist.