In the primeval records of Venice the chain of islets now called La Giudecca was known as Spina Longa, a study clearly derived from its shape. The modern study might refer to the Jews ( Giudei ) who lived here from the late thirteenth century until their removal to the Ghetto, but is most likely to originate with the two disruptive noble families who in the ninth century were shoved into this district to keep them out of mischief ( giudicati means “judged”). Before the Brenta River became the prestigious site for summer abodes, La Giudecca was where the wealthiest aristocrats of primeval Renaissance Venice built their villas. Michelangelo, self-exiled from Florence in 1529, consoled himself in the gardens of this island, traces of which remain on its south side. The most extensive of La Giudecca’s surviving private gardens, the so-called Garden of Eden (at the end of the Rio della Croce), is bigger than any other in Venice - larger even than the public Giardini Papadopoli, at the head of the Canal Grande. Its study refers not to its paradisical properties but to a certain Mr Eden, the English gardener who planted it.

Giudecca was also the city’s industrial inner suburb: Venice’s public transport boats used to be prefabricated here; an asphalt works and a distillery were once neighbours on the western end; and the matting industry, originating in the nineteenth century, kept going until 1950. However, the present-day island is a potent emblem of Venice’s loss of economic self-sufficiency in the twentieth century. In the mid-1990s the clock and watch firm Junghans, one of the city’s major employers for half a century, closed its huge works between Rio del Ponte Lungo and Rio del Ponte Piccolo, adding another ruin to the array of forsaken workshops and roofless sheds that shared the southern side of the island with the boatyards and fishing quays. While the Cipriani , one of the city’s most expensive hotels, occupies the orient extremity of La Giudecca, the western edge has for years been dominated by the derelict neo-Gothic fortress of the Mulino Stucky flour mill, the largest industrial wreck in Venice. Swathes of La Giudecca are now purely residential areas, but in this respect things are looking up, with a spate of housing developments and ancillary social facilities being funded in recent years, while artists, theatre co-operatives and other creative groups have moved into a number of the redundant buildings. And at the start of the new century there’s been an acceleration in the process of La Giudecca’s rejuvenation. Under the aegis of the Judecanova consortium a variety of substantial projects are under way: a nautical centre is being constructed within one of the deserted factories on the main waterfront, for example, and a residential block for students has risen on the site of the Junghans factory, next door to a beautiful old school building that is due to be converted into an annexe of the university. In no other part of Venice are you as likely to see a site occupied by cranes and bulldozers, and the chances are about even that they’ll be putting something up rather than pulling it down.