Tucked between Giudecca and the mainland, the small island of San Giorgio in Alga is one of the Venetian lagoon’s most layered and forgotten places.Its name comes from the algae that grow abundantly in the surrounding waters, and its history spans over a thousand years.
The first permanent marks on San Giorgio in Alga were made around 1000 AD, when a Benedictine monastery was established on the site. Over the following centuries, the island became something far more significant than its modest size might suggest. In the early 15th century, a congregation of canons took root here whose members would go on to become some of the most influential figures in Christian history. From this small lagoon island came Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first Patriarch of Venice, and Gabriele Condulmer, who would become Pope Eugene IV. During the Renaissance it was also an important centre for humanism, with a celebrated library, and foreign dignitaries stopped here before making their formal entrance into Venice.
The island is also linked to the presence of the Templar knights in Venice, who according to historical tradition may have used it as a staging point for the great Templar ships arriving from the Holy Land, unloading cargo onto smaller vessels before they could enter the city. The congregation founded here was later dissolved in 1668 by Pope Clement IX. A fire in 1717 destroyed most of what remained of the buildings, and by the end of the 18th century the island had become a political prison under Austrian rule. Its final chapter of inhabitation came during the Second World War, when, according to some historical accounts, it served as a secret training base for Nazi frogmen practicing the placement of underwater mines. Since then, it has been completely abandoned.
San Giorgio in Alga is far from alone in this fate. Abandoned islands are a global phenomenon, from Hashima in Japan, an entire industrial island city left to decay after its coal mines closed in 1974, to the deserted fortresses of Scotland’s outer archipelagos and uninhabited atolls across the Pacific swallowed by rising seas. What unites them, alongside their silence, is plastic. Litter travels on currents and tides, reaching the most remote and forgotten places on earth regardless of whether anyone lives there. The Venetian lagoon, with its dense constellation of islands at varying stages of abandonment and use, offers a rare and contained environment in which to study this phenomenon rigorously. That is part of what makes Venice such a valuable laboratory for marine litter research and why the data collected here carries relevance well beyond the lagoon itself.
On Friday 26 June, as part of the EU-funded JOINABLE project, Venice Lagoon Plastic Free carried out the first ever beach litter monitoring intervention along the shores of San Giorgio in Alga, applying the EU standardised monitoring protocol to document and quantify the litter accumulated on this uninhabited island.
The team catalogued 668 marine litter items along the transact of 100m of shoreline. The three most frequently found items were 160 glass fragments, 96 pieces of polystyrene, and 62 half-litre plastic bottles, a reminder that even the most remote corners of the Venetian lagoon are not beyond the reach of plastic pollution. This data contributes to VLPF’s ongoing effort to build a consistent and comparable dataset across the lagoon, feeding into the evidence base that informs both local environmental management and wider European policy on marine litter reduction.