San Francesco del Deserto Site Features

The buildings are deliberately plain, as a Franciscan house should be: brick and render, low, with no ornament to speak of.

Two cloisters are the heart of it -- one of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, small and worn, the other later. Both are simple arcaded squares around a garden.

The church is modest and much altered, with the remains of earlier structures beneath and around it.

What gives the island its character is not architecture but planting: avenues of cypresses, olives, a kitchen garden and open grass, laid out over centuries by people who lived there and had time.

The whole island is enclosed by a wall and a lagoon edge, and the buildings occupy only a small part of it.

The island is small -- a few hectares -- and lies in the northern lagoon between Burano and Sant'Erasmo, surrounded by open shallow water and salt marsh.

Its cypresses are the landmark, visible from Burano across the water and unusual in a lagoon whose islands are mostly low and treeless.

Around it are barene and tidal channels, and the silence is genuine: there is no road, no through traffic and no vaporetto route past it.

From the island's edge Torcello's campanile stands to the north-west and Burano's leaning tower to the west.