water and sky and a little earth

 · Abandoned to water and sky and what earth the roots of the scrubby trees hold: the little islands dotted around the lagoon of Venice intrigue.
 · An island now extinct once testified to the friendship of two Renaissance men: Jacopo Marcello, a Venetian nobleman, and Francesco Sforza, a condottiere who rose to be ruler of Milan from 1450 to 1566.
 · Marcello's tomb was on San Cristoforo della Pace. His some time brother-in-arms, some time adversary—but always friend, Francesco Sforza, was memorialized with a tablet in the same church for his role in the Peace of Lodi.
 · Francesco and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti commissioned the earliest extant tarot deck, whose cards illustrate pages of this site.
 · I arrived to this long-gone island while researching Francesco Sforza in Margaret L. King's The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello
 · The church is gone and its precious artworks and testimonies are gone, along with the island itself. All were razed by order of Napoleon, in order to join the island of San Cristoforo to the cemetary island of San Michele.

The abandoned island of Santo Spirito, in 2008. In the 18th century, "the island was occupied by Minor Observant Friars transferred from Crete after its loss to the Turks."
THIS is how it looked, back then.
photo and quote from ABANDONED ISLANDS OF THE VENETIAN LAGOON by Giorgio and Maurizio Crovato, San Marco Press