Torcello Cathedral (Santa Maria Assunta)

The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on the lagoon island of Torcello is the oldest surviving building in the Venetian Lagoon and one of the most important Byzantine monuments in Italy. According to an inscription once on the site, a church was first founded here in 639, when Torcello was a thriving settlement of refugees from the mainland and, for a time, more populous and prosperous than Venice itself. The cathedral that stands today is essentially the building rebuilt in 1008, a tall, austere brick basilica with a nave and two aisles separated by columns of Greek marble with finely carved capitals, lit by small windows still fitted in places with their original stone shutters. Its overwhelming glory is its mosaics. Filling the apse above the altar is a tall, slender figure of the Hodegetria, the Virgin standing alone against a plain gold ground and holding the Christ Child — one of the most moving images in all Byzantine art. Covering the entire west wall, by contrast, is a vast and densely populated Last Judgement worked in mosaic between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, rising in tiers from the Crucifixion and the Harrowing of Hell through the weighing of souls to the torments of the damned, a composition that rivals the mosaics of St Mark's in scope and quality. The floor preserves an eleventh-century opus sectile pavement of coloured marble. Beside the cathedral stand the small church of Santa Fosca, a Greek-cross Byzantine building, and a detached campanile that can be climbed for views across the empty lagoon. As Torcello's population dwindled with the silting of its canals and the rise of malaria, the once-great town shrank to a handful of inhabitants, and the cathedral was left marooned among reed beds and fields — which is why it survives so little altered. Carefully conserved, Santa Maria Assunta today offers an almost unbroken view of early medieval lagoon civilisation, far from the crowds of central Venice.