Mercato di Sacca Fisola Site Features

Stalls -- really truck beds -- offer a wide mix: fresh fruit and vegetables, wine, cheese, and cured meats alongside vintage home goods, clothing, and shoes. The variety and the truck-bed setup are what set it apart from Venice's more conventional produce markets.

Sacca Fisola is not old ground. A sacca is a shallow inlet, and this one was filled during the 20th century with dredged spoil and industrial fill to make new land at the western end of Giudecca -- one of the last pieces of Venice to be manufactured rather than settled.

It looks it. The island is laid out in blocks of mid-century apartment housing with grass between them, wide pavements, a sports ground and a school: an ordinary Italian residential estate that happens to be surrounded by lagoon. There are no calli, no campi and no palaces.

A single bridge connects it to Giudecca, and Giudecca itself connects to nothing except by water. That double separation is why the market's vendors have to bring their trucks across on a ferry, and why almost no visitor arrives here by accident.

The compensation is the outlook. From the western edge the view is across open lagoon toward Fusina and the mainland, with Venice's skyline behind rather than in front -- one of the few places to see the city from the outside, at a distance, as a silhouette on the water.