Discover Pellestrina

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.