Grado and the lagoon
An island with a Roman town inside it, and around it a hundred and sixty square kilometres of shallow water.
Grado is an island joined to the mainland by a road five kilometres long across the lagoon. At its centre is the Roman castrum, with narrow lanes and three early Christian basilicas within a few metres of one another; around it, the beach, which faces south and is the only one on the upper Adriatic to do so.
The water is shallow and warm, and the town has been known for a century for its seawater spa: which is why here, more than elsewhere, you see families with very young children and older people. The campsites are in the pine wood to the east, towards Rotta Primero.
The lagoon
Behind the island begins a world half a metre deep, of channels marked by poles, mudflats that vanish with the tide and reed huts roofed to the ground. You go out by boat from the harbour, or by bicycle on the road to Aquileia. On the island of Barbana there is a sanctuary the people of Grado have processed to for nearly eight hundred years.
Aquileia
Ten kilometres away lies what remains of one of the largest cities of the Roman empire: the forum, the river port, and in the basilica a mosaic floor of seven hundred and fifty square metres, the largest in the early Christian world. It takes two hours to visit and it is a Unesco site.