Discover San Francesco del Deserto

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.