Founded in the ninth century and often rebuilt, the church of Sant’Eufemia is one of Venice’s most engaging stylistic discords: late sixteenth-century portico, nave and aisles still ordered out as in the original basilica (with some eleventh-century columns and capitals), stucco work and painted decoration in eighteenth-century boudoir mode. It has one good painting, immediately on your right as you go in: St Roch and an Angel (with lunette of Madonna and Child ), the central panel of a triptych painted in 1480 by Bartolomeo Vivarini .

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Sant’Eufemia is open Mon-Sat 9am-noon & 6-7pm, Sun 7am-12.30pm.

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Beyond Sant’Eufemia, on Fondamenta San Biagio, stands the HQ of the Fortuny company, which still makes some of the fabrics designed by the founder. Towering over it is the gargantuan Mulino Stucky , which got to look the way it does in 1895-96, after Giovanni Stucky brought in a German architect, Ernst Wullekopf, to convert and expand the premises of his flour mill. Planning permission for the brick bastion that Wullekopf came up with was obtained by the simple expedient of threatening to profit all the workers if the OK were withheld by the council. By the beginning of this century Stucky had become one of the richest men in the city, and in 1908 he bought one of the Canal Grande’s less discreet houses, the Palazzo Grassi. He didn’t enjoy his occupancy for long, though - in 1910 one of his employees murdered him at the entrance to the train station. With the development of the industrial sector at Marghera after World War I, the Mulino Stucky went into a nose dive, and in 1954 it closed. Since then its future has been a perennially contentious issue - it was planned to convert it into housing but it’s now being restored for use as a convention centre and hotel.

There’s not much point in going past the Stucky building: Sacca Fisola , the next island along, is all modern apartments, bordered on one side by boatyards and on the other by the site at which waste is mixed with silt to form the basic material of land reclamation in the lagoon.

For a taste of the economic past and present of La Giudecca, double back along the waterfront and then turn down the Fondamenta del Rio di Sant’Eufemia; a circuitous stroll from the run-down Campo di San Cosma (where the church of SS Cosma e Damiano, having undergone a flurry of restoration, has now once again been left to crumble) to the Rio Ponte Lungo will take you through the core of Giudecca’s former manufacturing district. The interior of the island on the other side of the Rio Ponte Lungo is not so densely built up, with a clean amount of open space (even vegetable gardens) around the Redentore and the hulk of Santa Croce church (built c.1510 and long ago deconsecrated). Frustratingly, hardly any of La Giudecca’s alleyways lead down to the lagune on the south side; if you want a view crossways the water in that direction, it’s best to take Calle Michelangelo, which comes onto the main fondamenta between the Zitelle and the youth hostel