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The fishing village of Malamocco is the successor of the ancient settlement called Metamauco, which in the eighth century was the capital of the lagoon confederation. In 810 the town was taken by Pepin , son of Charlemagne, and there followed one of the crucial battles in Venice's history, when Pepin's fleet, endeavouring to reach the islands of Rivoalto (forerunner of Venice), became jammed in the mudbanks and was swiftly pounced upon. After the battle the capital was promptly transferred to the safer islands of Rivoalto, and in 1107 the old town was destroyed by a tidal wave. The new town has a place in the bloodier footnotes of later Venetian history - the Canal Orfano , off the Malamocco shore, was the spot where some of those condemned by the Council of Ten were bound, gagged, weighted and thrown overboard by the executioner. Rebuilt Malamocco's most appealing building - the church's scaled-down replica of the Campanile of San Marco - can be seen without getting off the bus.

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The vaporetto to San Lazzaro passes along a section of the Canal Orfano.

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The most ferocious defenders of the lagoon in the war against Pepin came from the small island of Poveglia , just off Malamocco. Once populous enough to have a practically independent administration, it suffered greatly in the war against Genoa and went into a steep decline immediately after, becoming little more than a fort. For much of this century it was a hospital island, but since the closure of the hospital in the late 1960s it has been abandoned.

Fishing and the production of fine pillow-lace are the mainstays of life in the village of Pellestrina , which is strung out along nearly a third of the ten kilometres of the next island. There's one remarkable structure here, but you get the best view of it as the boat crosses to Chioggia. This is the Murazzi , the colossal walls of Istrian boulders, 4km long and 14m thick at the base, which were constructed at the sides of the Porto di Chioggia to protect Venice from the battering of the sea. The maintenance of the water level in the lagoon has always been a preoccupation of Venetian life: very early in the city's development, for example, the five gaps in the lidi (the Lido-Chioggia sandbars) were reduced to the present three to strengthen the barrier against the Adriatic and to increase the dredging action of the tides through the three remaining porti . In time a special state official, the Magistrato alle Acque , was appointed to supervise the management of the lagoon, and the Murazzi were the last major project undertaken by the Magistrato 's department. Devised as a response to the increased flooding of the early eighteenth century, the Murazzi took 38 years to build, and remained unbreached from 1782, the year of their completion, until the flood of November 1966. The latest flood-prevention scheme on Pellestrina involves the widening and raising of its beaches, to take the force out of the action of the sea; by the year 2000 some 9km of new beach had been created here, and similar projects are under way at various other points along the shore between the Lido and Chioggia.