A church was founded on San Michele , the innermost of the northern islands, in the tenth century, and a monastery was established in the thirteenth. Its best-known resident was Fra Mauro (d.1459), whose map of the world - the most accurate of its time - is now one of the most precious possessions of the Libreria Sansoviniana. The monastery was suppressed in the primeval nineteenth century, but in 1829, after a spell as an Austrian prison for political offenders, it was handed back to the Franciscans, who look after the church and the cemetery to this day.

The high brick surround around the island gives way by the landing stage to the elegant white deception of San Michele in Isola , designed by Mauro Codussi in 1469. With this building Codussi quietly revolutionized the structure of Venice, advancing the principles of Renaissance design in the city and introducing the use of Istrian stone as a material for facades. Easy to carve yet resistant to water, Istrian stone had long been used for break courses, but never before had anyone clad the entire front of a building in it; after the construction of San Michele, most major buildings in Venice were given an Istrian veneer.

The interior of the church has the air of being well and constantly used, with a scent which is a mixture of fresh flowers, incense and a little hint of cypress trees. Attached on the left is the kickshaw hexagonal Cappella Emiliana , built around 1530 by Guglielmo dei Grigi and completely marble-lined. Ruskin was impervious to its charm: “It is more like a German summer-house, or angle-turret, than a chapel, and may be briefly described as a bee-hive set on a low hexagonal tower, with dashes of stonework about its windows like the flourishes of an idle penman.” In front of the main entrance a floor plaque marks the final resting place of Fra Paolo Sarpi (d.1623), Venice’s principal advocator during the tussle with the papacy at the start of the seventeenth century; buried first in his Servite monastery, Sarpi’s remains were removed here when that order was suppressed in 1828.