Venice's abandoned Poveglia island saved as public green space

Venice residents have secured the long-uninhabited island of Poveglia as a public green space, NPR reported on Friday, capping a year-long campaign that began when the island was eyed for development. The broadcaster's State of the World program describes a citizen brigade that organised to save a place Venice residents hold dear, and that is now transforming it into one of the lagoon's rare open public grounds.

Poveglia sits in the southern lagoon, a short crossing from the Lido and the guidebook routes that carry most visitors to Venice. For much of the last century it served as a place of isolation — for plague victims in earlier times and later for the sick — and its abandoned buildings have long fed an international appetite for so-called dark tourism. The news from NPR is that the island is now being remade not as a spectacle but as a green space for residents.

That distinction matters in a city whose municipal identity is increasingly defined by tourism. Open land in Venice is scarce, and nearly every empty corner of the lagoon has been proposed at some point for hotels, resorts or cultural venues. Poveglia, if the transformation holds, will stand as the exception: a piece of Venice preserved for the people who live there.

NPR does not report the identity of the would-be developer or the specific plan that triggered the campaign, and its account focuses on the outcome rather than the procedural details. What comes through clearly is the scale of civic energy: a 'citizen brigade' formed, organised, and a year later is still at work transforming the island. Poveglia has been in public hands for most of the past century, and the campaign appears to have kept it there.

The Poveglia story resonates beyond its small patch of lagoon. Venice's civic groups have spent the past decade pressing the city to weigh residents against visitors, from the introduction of the day-tripper levy to repeated debates over cruise ship access. The island campaign belongs to that same current, in which the goal is not simply to stop something but to define what Venice is for.

For the city's remaining residents — a population that has been declining for decades — a green island in the southern lagoon is a modest but visible gain. NPR's international audience will know Poveglia chiefly from ghost stories and old photographs of abandonment; the report offers a different image, of citizens at work rather than tourists with cameras. The State of the World segment shifts the frame from a place known mainly for its sinister past to one defined by civic achievement.

The transformation is still under way, and NPR's report does not specify when the green space will be complete or how it will be managed. What is already established is the precedent: a beloved, uninhabited island in the heart of the lagoon has been wrested from the logic of development and returned to common use. For a city that the world consumes at a furious pace, that is no small thing.