Santa Marta Farmers Market Site Features

Stalls sell fresh vegetables (including the seasonal, hard-to-find puntarelle), fruit, meat, poultry, salami, and dairy, including buffalo-milk pannacotta, with a numbered-ticket system at each stall to manage the queue. It's a small market -- easily covered in twenty minutes -- but consistently well-priced and genuinely local.

Santa Marta is the far western tip of Dorsoduro, past the Zattere and past San Basilio, where Venice stops being medieval and becomes a port.

The district was made by industry rather than by the Republic. The rail bridge of 1846 landed here, and what followed was the Maritime Station, the gas works, warehouses and in 1883 the Cotonificio Veneziano cotton mill -- brick industrial buildings on a scale found nowhere else in the city, laid out on straight lines because there was no older fabric to work around.

Most of that has changed use rather than disappeared. The Cotonificio is now the architecture faculty of Iuav university, which means the streets carry students and the market's Monday customers include a good number of them.

The waterfront here faces the Giudecca Canal at its widest and busiest, where the cruise ships and commercial traffic pass. It is the least picturesque water in Venice and the most active, and the contrast with the lagoon side of the city is total.