Most islands in the Venice lagoon are empty because the institutions that filled them closed and nothing replaced them. Quarantine stations, hospitals, monasteries, powder magazines and octagonal forts were shut through the 19th and 20th centuries, and their buildings were left standing. The land stayed in public hands, and the state now offers it to private investors on long leases sold at auction.
That process is what a visitor runs into when trying to land. Poveglia, the best known of the empty islands, has been through an auction, a decade of appeals and an outright ban on setting foot on it, and since 2025 part of it is managed by a citizens' association on a six-year concession (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, pp. 9, 22). La Certosa went the other way, from a munitions factory to a marina and a restaurant, with parts of the island reachable only by booking (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 23).
This page sets out who owns the empty islands of the lagoon, how the state hands them over, what has been proposed for Poveglia, La Certosa and Ca' Roman, and where the ghost stories about Poveglia came from.
Why are so many Venice lagoon islands abandoned?
The empty islands are public property, and the standard way the state parts with them is a long lease sold at auction. Land in the lagoon belongs to the state property agency, and under the national Valore Paese programme the most used tool is a 99-year concession awarded by auction, meant to draw private money into restoration work (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 11). Because the eligibility criteria often put economic viability first, projects with limited social or environmental commitments can come out ahead (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 11).
The decay went almost unnoticed until 1978, when a Venetian rowing association mounted a photographic exhibition on the subject, followed by a catalogue that became the standard book on the abandoned islands (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 209). Its 2009 edition listed the islands then abandoned or at risk: Madonna del Monte, Sant'Ariano, La Cura, San Secondo, Santo Spirito, San Giorgio in Alga and Sant'Angelo delle Polveri, along with the former military batteries and the octagonal forts of Alberoni, Abbandonato, Ca' Roman and San Pietro (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 209).
Three outcomes have followed. Some islands were restored and returned to public use, Lazzaretto Nuovo through volunteer archaeology and San Servolo as a university campus. Others became hotels, San Clemente in 2003 and Sacca Sessola, rebranded Isola delle Rose, which reopened as a chain resort in 2015. The rest were left as they were (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, pp. 209 to 210).
Poveglia: from village to lazzaretto to a closed island
Poveglia lies in the southern lagoon between Giudecca and the Lido. Its main part covers 7.5 hectares and is split in two by a narrow canal, with a 16th century octagonal battery on the water in front of it; the lagoon's octagonal forts were fortified in 1571 (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 209). Eleven crumbling or ruined buildings stand on the island today, among them the San Vitale bell tower, which also served as a lighthouse (Cavallo and Visentin, 2020, p. 198).
The island, once called Popilia, was inhabited from late antiquity, and hundreds of people lived there in the 13th and 14th centuries. When the War of Chioggia broke out in 1379 between Genoa and Venice the population was evacuated so the island could be used as a military outpost, and that was the first abandonment. The doge offered Poveglia to the Camaldolese monks in 1527 and to the descendants of the original inhabitants in 1661, and it stayed empty through both offers (Cavallo and Visentin, 2020, p. 198).
Poveglia became a restricted area in 1793 and then a lazzaretto, a confinement station for plague victims, from 1805 to 1814. In the 20th century it worked as a maritime sanitary station, its buildings were converted into a sanatorium for elderly long-term patients in 1922, and the hospital closed in 1968. After that the island was briefly used as a vegetable garden and left to a watchperson, and then left alone entirely (Cavallo and Visentin, 2020, p. 198).
The 2014 Poveglia auction and the citizens who bid for the island
In December 2013 the Italian culture ministry, following a policy of selling state property to reduce the national debt, allowed the state property office to put Poveglia up for lease. In March 2014 the office announced that a 99-year lease would be offered at online auction alongside other historic Italian properties (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, pp. 212 to 213). An association, Poveglia per tutti, formed on Giudecca and asked supporters for 99 euros each so it could bid. By the end of April 2014 about 4,000 members had joined and roughly 500,000 euros had been collected (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 213). A later account puts the sum raised at over 450,000 euros (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 22), so treat the total as approximate.
The auction produced no sale. A company owned by a local entrepreneur, who went on to become mayor of Venice, bid higher than the association, and the office withdrew the auction, declaring the 500,000 euro offer inadequate for the island's size and buildings (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 214; Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 22). A request for a concession was rejected in July 2015 (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 214). After nearly ten years of appeals the agency granted the association a six-year concession over the northern part of the island in 2025, covering maintenance, cleaning, cultural events and a planned urban park (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, pp. 9, 22).
Can you visit Poveglia, and is it really haunted?
Access has swung back and forth. In February 2018 the state property office declared it illegal for the public to set foot on Poveglia. That ban had lapsed by the beginning of 2020, after which the island was reachable occasionally and with the office's permission, and landing was awkward in any case because the landing facilities had deteriorated (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 214). Poveglia has no protected status of its own, although it sits in a part of the southern lagoon that holds habitats of high value (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 22). Treat the island as closed unless a trip is arranged with permission in hand.
The haunting is recent and traceable. Paranormal blogs took an interest in the first months of 2005 and produced the story of an island mental institution with sadistic doctors and mass plague graves, and in 2007 websites added that the island was forbidden and that any footage shot there would be seized (Cavallo and Visentin, 2020, pp. 200 to 201). The mass grave photographs that circulate online in fact show archaeological excavations on another lagoon island, the quarantine station of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Between the 1920s and the 1960s Poveglia held a few patients most likely affected by senile dementia; the Venetian asylums for the mentally ill were on San Clemente and San Servolo (Cavallo and Visentin, 2020, p. 200).
La Certosa: a munitions island that became a marina
La Certosa sits close to the historic centre, and it shows what happens when an empty island does find an investor. The Pirotecnica della Certosa, a munitions factory, worked until 1958. The state property agency then granted the island to the Comune di Venezia, which in 2003 entered a partnership with a private company that had won a public tender for managing and developing the area (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 23).
The project promised environmental and architectural restoration, an urban park, expanded private nautical facilities and the redevelopment of the remains of the 16th century charterhouse that gives the island its name. What is there in practice is a working marina, a restaurant, and spaces for events and sports. The promised urban park is only partly completed, full public access remains an unmet goal, and as of 2025 many areas were still degraded or reachable only by reservation (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 23).
The heritage organisation Italia Nostra criticised the lack of transparency and of a shared management plan, calling the arrangement a reckless sell-off of natural and historical heritage (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 23). An interviewee in the same study takes the opposite view, describing the current arrangement as a compromise that at least keeps the island from becoming a hotel (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 12). The dispute has run for more than twenty years, the longest of the six the study examines (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 9).
Ca' Roman and the plans that stalled on Pellestrina
Ca' Roman, at the southern end of Pellestrina, is the case where nothing has happened in either direction. The site is part of the Natura 2000 network and is managed as an oasis by the Italian league for bird protection, and inside it stand several abandoned buildings, including a former summer camp run by a religious order, now a wooden and masonry structure in severe decay (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 21).
In 2009 the Comune di Venezia approved an amendment to its master plan that changed the land use designation and allowed building on a site previously restricted by environmental rules. A private company's project would demolish the derelict buildings and put up 84 housing units. Environmental organisations appealed to the regional administrative court and the Council of State over priority habitats and the Kentish plover, and in 2017 the courts blocked construction on part of the site. A new detailed plan in 2024 concentrated building in the already built-up area. The project is formally approved and work has not started (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, p. 21).
One thing on the island is moving. In 2021 the public works authority allocated funds to restore the abandoned Ca' Roman fort, under the compensation plan drawn up for the MOSE works after the European Commission opened an infringement procedure over the missing environmental impact assessment. Management went to the bird protection league, which plans a guesthouse and an environmental education centre (Tonegatti and Marini Govigli, 2026, pp. 12, 21).
The quarantine islands and what the archaeology found
The lagoon's institutional islands began with disease control, and Venice invented the vocabulary. The city raised the 30-day isolation decreed at Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, to 40 days, and that is where the word quarantine comes from (Tran et al., 2011, p. 4). Plague reached Venice in 1348, and further epidemics followed in 1462, 1485, 1506, 1575 to 1577 and 1630 to 1632. Deaths were first recorded in the epidemic of 1575 to 1577, with a mortality rate of 27.8 per cent, and the epidemic of 1630 to 1632 killed 32.5 per cent of the Venetian population (Tran et al., 2011, p. 1).
Lazzaretto Vecchio, the island used to isolate and bury the sick, was excavated when its buildings were renovated in 2004 and 2005. The work uncovered 92 burial locations, graves and trenches, each holding between 5 and 184 individuals, with pottery dating the earliest to the second half of the 14th century (Tran et al., 2011, p. 1). What makes the site unusual among excavated plague burials is that it was used across four centuries of outbreaks rather than during a single epidemic (Tran et al., 2011, p. 4).
Two of these islands have since been reopened. Lazzaretto Nuovo was restored and opened to the public by volunteer groups that run archaeological camps there, and San Servolo, once the men's asylum, became an international study and conference centre that keeps an archive and a permanent exhibition on its former use (Cavallo and Visentin, 2021, p. 210).
