Let's bike through Venice's "vegetable garden" which produces all the fruit and vegetables consumed by the hungry city! We will bike through artichokes fields and farms, admiring the Venice skyline from a very unusual view and tasting honey uniquely produced only the island!
Details:
We will reach the Sant'Erasmo island, thanks to a 30 minutes Vaporetto ride through the lagoon.
Once landed, we will walk through a small road passing canals and ditches and we will rent our countryside bikes.
We will pass by the Torre Massimiliana, a 19th-century Austrian fort sometimes used for art exhibitions and surrounded by a stagnant moat, started by the Napoleonic regime and finished by the Austrian.
Then we will be ready to discover the island, the largest island in the Venetian lagoon, though it's only sparsely populated!
Seven-hundred farmers still plough its fields supplying not only the typical purple-hued artichokes, the slow food praesidium “Carciofo Violetto di Sant'Erasmo”, but also asparagus, squash, tomatoes, and cardoons to the city of Venice. Locals buy them at the Rialto market and you can enjoy them in every restaurant in Venice.
Once a rural retreat for aristocrats, the islands now provides a largely tourist-free refuge for Venetian families who moor their boats along its mud banks and picnic on its sandy beaches.
The landscape is flat, and therefore biking will be very easy and dotted with farms and rural small-holdings. It couldn't be more different from Venice, whose bell-towers and churches can be seen on the skyline.
We will reach the northern part, facing across the water and mud banks towards the islands of Burano, whose coloured houses can just be distinguished, and San Francesco del Deserto, a monastery inhabited by Franciscan monks. We will then reach one of the few notable building on the island, the church, facing the lagoon.
In this extremely particular landscape, not only artichokes and vegetable taste special but also flowers! And bees know that very well. We will have the opportunity to try the special honey produced here, whose taste is unique! And if you are in a group of more than 3, a local honey producer will provide us with safety instruction and equipment to approach bees while they are working for us! (apiary visit depending on the farm and bee’s availability!)
Our experience will end with an optional visit to a local winery and, if you wish, a wine tasting of produces coming from the local vineyards and bio-farms.
Feel free to ask for more further details!