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Hospital Islands
San Lazzaro is the only minor island of the southern lagune that’s of interest to tourists. The boat out to San Lazzaro calls at La Grazia , successively a pilgrims’ hostel, a monastery and now a hospital, and San Servolo , once one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in the region (founded in the ninth century), then a hospital for the insane, then the home of the Council of Europe’s School of Craftsmanship, and now the base of Venice International University, a study centre administered by universities in Italy, Japan, Germany and the US. San Clemente , to the south of La Grazia, was another hospital island until 1992, when it was closed down; a scheme for an upmarket hotel complex on the island has been approved, but at the moment it serves as a refuge for Venice’s stray cats, which are scooped out of the city’s alleyways by a local animal welfare group and transported to the greener terrain of San Clemente. There are no big plans for Sacca Sessola , the large hospital island to the southwest of San Clemente, which ceased to function in 1980, but a sports centre has been drafted for the ex-ammunition works on Santo Spirito , southeast of Sacca Sessola; until the mid-seventeenth century there was a monastery here, with a church redesigned by Sansovino, but when the order was suppressed most of its treasures, including paintings by Titian, were sent to the then unfinished Salute church on the Canal Grande, where they can now be seen. Lazzaretto Vecchio (south of San Lazzaro), at present a dogs’ home, is also due to have a sports complex built on it; the site of a pilgrim’s hostel from the twelfth century, the island took a place in medical history when, in 1423, it became the site of Europe’s first permanent isolation hospital for plague victims.
