A drawing of the islands of Sant' Elena and La Certosa in Venice. Sant' Elena is shown on the right, and smoke can be seen rising from one of the buildings of the monastery of the same name on the island.

The thirteenth-century Olivetan monastery of Sant’Elena stood on an island at the far east of Venice, separated from the Punta di Sant’Antonio by a broad muddy channel. The monastery was dissolved in 1810, though most of the buildings, including the fifteenth-century church, still exist. The Canale di Sant’Elena was mostly filled in and covered with apartment blocks and a sports stadium during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the area is now one of the least typical parts of Venice.

The island of La Certosa, seen to the left a little further away, retains its identity, though the monastery (originally of the twelfth century and rebuilt by Pietro Lombardo in the fifteenth) was likewise suppressed in 1806. The demolition of the church and the dispersal of its works of art was one of the greatest losses to Venice of the Napoleonic period. The island was subsequently considered as the location of a new cemetery, served as a military base for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the 1960s was even proposed as the site for a multi-storey carpark serving a new causeway connecting the islands of the lagoon, a scheme that was abandoned. Long-term plans to turn the island into a public park have not been realised.

Catalogue entry adapted from Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005