Before Venice, there was Torcello. Between the 7th and 10th centuries, the lagoon island was one of the richest and most populous centres of the upper Adriatic, where trade, warehouses, monasteries and religious power were concentrated, as attested by the church of Santa Fosca and the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, inside which one can admire a cycle of mosaics including the gigantic Last Judgement, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Byzantine art in the West. At the time, between 10,000 and 20,000 people lived there, while Venice was still a small settlement.

This history, together with the origins of life in the Venetian lagoon, is traced through the museum’s documents, with a medieval and modern section in the Palazzo del Consiglio, and an archaeological one in the neighbouring Palazzo dell’Archivio. Renovated last March, it became part of Venice’s Civic Museums network, the thirteenth to join.

Today, only ten people live in Torcello, the most depopulated of the lagoon islands, with no chemist and no supermarket. And this is precisely its beauty. To see what the lagoon looked like before the Serenissima, one need only take a walk around the island: the landscape is just as it once was: reed beds, salt marshes, silent canals, meadows, waterfowl, the odd crab fisherman. And the ever-present winter mists, which almost erase it from the imagination.

There are none of Burano’s colourful little houses, nor the bustle of Murano. In fact, there isn’t even a proper village, just a square, a few churches, an antiques shop with a garden where the native Dorona grape variety grows, four restaurants and the Locanda Cipriani, still the island’s only, tiny hotel — though one that has made the island’s history. Originally a wine and oil shop, when Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar, bought it in 1936, his intention was to create a place to relax, away from the city. In 1947, he turned the shop into an inn with six rooms, a good restaurant and a beautiful garden. After almost eighty years, hundreds of anecdotes and a guest book worthy of a Grand Hotel in St Tropez, in 2023 the Ciprianis renovated the inn with the understated elegance that distinguishes all their projects, from Milan to Dubai to the United States. They refurbished the interiors, repositioned some of the original furniture, paintings and lamps, added four new suites, and tidied and enlarged the rose garden and vegetable patch. And last June, after three years of work, they reopened. If it were ever possible, everything seems unchanged, as though it had always been there, and yet everything is new. The new brocades, wood panelling, chandeliers and brass fittings don’t take away a scrap of the place’s magic. Perhaps it’s because, the moment you walk in, the “usual” is ready for you; the Bellini with Prosecco and peach purée, an invention of the founder. Perhaps it’s the fritto misto and that exquisite flambéed meringue cake, the house speciality. No one could doubt they are at the same old Locanda Cipriani, only more up to date, comfortable and refined, ready to write a new chapter in Torcello’s history. With this reopening, the island will certainly return to the spotlight of the most elegant international tourism. But, the family promise, without shattering the bucolic atmosphere that makes the little island one of the rare places where one feels far from everything, in a kind of rediscovered paradise.

Tourists disembark in the morning, take a selfie by the fifteenth-century Devil’s Bridge, one of the very few without a parapet, snap a photo of the famous marble Throne of Attila (who, in fact, never set foot on the island), take a tour of the splendid Byzantine churches and then leave. At dusk, the island sinks back into its usual silence and remains there until the following morning, when the birdsong begins well before the first vaporetto arrives from Venice.

Previously published on Il Sole 24 Ore, 18th July 2926