Orto delle Meraviglie Site Features

The garden itself spans roughly six thousand square meters of the former convent grounds, organically farmed and yielding around forty different fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs across the growing season. The produce stand on Fondamenta del Carcere, just outside the prison walls, is the garden's most visible and accessible feature for anyone not visiting on a scheduled tour.

The garden occupies more than six thousand square metres inside the walls of the women's prison on Giudecca, on ground that has been enclosed for five centuries -- first as the Convertite convent, then as a military prison, then as the prison it still is.

Giudecca is the right island for it. Long, low and separated from Venice by a wide canal, it has always held the things the city put at arm's length: convents, warehouses, the Molino Stucky, boatyards and social housing. It is residential and unpolished in a way the historic centre no longer is.

Nothing of the garden is visible from outside. The walls are high and continuous, and the only point of contact with the city is the produce stand on the Fondamenta del Carcere -- a table on the pavement outside the gate, on the canal-side walk.

Around forty varieties of fruit, vegetables, flowers and wild herbs are grown across the season, on soil in the middle of a lagoon city that imports almost all of its food.

The Redentore and the Zitelle are along the same fondamenta, and the walk between them passes the stand without most people realising what it is.