Sant’Erasmo Site Features

The artichoke

The carciofo violetto, and particularly the castraure -- the first apical bud cut from each plant in spring, which forces the others to grow. Sold for a few weeks only, and the island holds a festival for it in May.

Torre Massimiliana

The circular Austrian fort of the 1840s, restored and used for exhibitions and the artichoke festival.

The open horizon

Flat fields, ditches, vines and the lagoon on every side, with Venice a low silhouette to the south-west. There is nowhere else this close to the city that looks like this.

The lagoon edge

The island's margins are salt marsh and mudflat -- the barene that make up most of the real lagoon and that visitors to Venice almost never see.

Sant'Erasmo lies in the northern lagoon, north-east of Venice and immediately west of the Lido's northern end, covering roughly four square kilometres of almost perfectly flat ground.

The soil is sandy and mildly saline, which is the whole agricultural story: it produces vegetables with a distinct character, and the artichoke in particular is tied to it.

The island is worked in long narrow fields divided by drainage ditches, with vines, orchards and open ground between. There is no high ground anywhere and few trees, so the sky dominates.

Its edges dissolve into barene -- the salt marshes that are the lagoon's actual natural habitat, cut by tidal channels and covered at high water.