Description
The Giudecca is the island facing Dorsoduro, across the canal of the same name, reached by vaporetto from the Zattere. It is really eight small islands joined together: a quiet residential district, with little tourism, from which you see Venice from afar.
For centuries it was the city's green zone, full of vegetable plots and gardens. The best overall view of the Redentore is from the Zattere embankment, on the opposite shore.
Here Palladio left two churches. The basilica of the Redentore was a vow of the city for the end of the plague of 1576, which killed a third of Venetians; it was built between 1577 and 1592, and the Festa del Redentore still commemorates it every year.
Not far away is the church of the Zitelle, also by Palladio. The convent beside it took in poor girls, who learned traditional crafts here, such as the famous Venetian lace.
Also worth a look are Sant'Eufemia, which dates back to the ninth century and is among the oldest churches in Venice, and the neo-Gothic Molino Stucky, built in 1895 by Giovanni Stucky: it was a flour mill, now it is a hotel.
The island was once called Spinalonga, perhaps for its long, narrow shape like a fishbone. Then it became the Giudecca, and historians have never agreed on why.
For some the name comes from the Jews, "giudei": tradition speaks of two synagogues and a stone with Hebrew inscriptions, for which there is however no historical proof. For others it comes from "zudegà", "judged", the sentence by which in the ninth century the Republic gave lands to some families unjustly exiled.
There is then a third, more prosaic theory, tied to work: leather tanners used shrubs and brushwood, called "zuèc" in the Veneto, and the name may come from there.
At the western tip stands the Molino Stucky, at the opposite one the Hotel Cipriani, one of Venice's most luxurious residences: in between, the island is made of quiet fondamente and calli.
For centuries it was the city's green zone, full of vegetable plots and gardens. The best overall view of the Redentore is from the Zattere embankment, on the opposite shore.
Here Palladio left two churches. The basilica of the Redentore was a vow of the city for the end of the plague of 1576, which killed a third of Venetians; it was built between 1577 and 1592, and the Festa del Redentore still commemorates it every year.
Not far away is the church of the Zitelle, also by Palladio. The convent beside it took in poor girls, who learned traditional crafts here, such as the famous Venetian lace.
Also worth a look are Sant'Eufemia, which dates back to the ninth century and is among the oldest churches in Venice, and the neo-Gothic Molino Stucky, built in 1895 by Giovanni Stucky: it was a flour mill, now it is a hotel.
The island was once called Spinalonga, perhaps for its long, narrow shape like a fishbone. Then it became the Giudecca, and historians have never agreed on why.
For some the name comes from the Jews, "giudei": tradition speaks of two synagogues and a stone with Hebrew inscriptions, for which there is however no historical proof. For others it comes from "zudegà", "judged", the sentence by which in the ninth century the Republic gave lands to some families unjustly exiled.
There is then a third, more prosaic theory, tied to work: leather tanners used shrubs and brushwood, called "zuèc" in the Veneto, and the name may come from there.
At the western tip stands the Molino Stucky, at the opposite one the Hotel Cipriani, one of Venice's most luxurious residences: in between, the island is made of quiet fondamente and calli.