La Rocca, Riva del Garda's Medieval Castle

Wednesday 30 June 2003. After our jaunt to Torbole, we arrived back at Riva at the top end of Italy's Lake Garda, with sore feet and a desire to sit for a bit and do nothing much. The soreness in the feet has since worn off, but the desire to sit and do nothing has strangely remained...

So we found an empty bench on the corner of La Rocca, Riva's medieval castle and fortress.

It has a history going back to the year 1124 CE when the citizens of Riva were granted the right to build a castle here. Since then it was done up somewhat in the 1500s as a suitable lodging place for any passing Prince Bishops who may have wanted to spend a night or couple of months and in the mid 1800s was totally rearranged inside to turn it into a barracks for the Austro-Hungarian armies.

It is small, but formidable and even moated all the way around. Once the armies had done with it in more recent times it had some more restorative work done, and some of its early medieval structures were found and in 2003 it housed and still houses a museum.

I came over all arty and got the pad and pencil out for half an hour's scribbling. As we sat on a bench to sketch it we listened to a concert of film music coming from inside. If you look in any brochure for Lake Garda you will find a photograph from this viewpoint. It is the one crucial image - like a photograph of Blackpool Tower is crucial to any brochure of Blackpool.

We wern't sure whether it was a free concert or not so we went to have a look. Inside we heard a warning twittering and looked up to see some of the small birds who had shared our food in the cafe had built a nest under the archway. It didn't look as though we could get in!

Looking down the western arm of the moat towards the 30-mile length of Lake Garda with the mountains on the eastern side visible. As Riva sits between mountains on both sides the light goes quickly and early.

We still had a couple of hours of daylight left though and at a lakeside cafe we got re-acquainted with a latte machiatto each - warm milk with a shot of espresso poured in. This was to become our favourite Italian luxury!

Then Miss Franny seemed to want to go window shopping for some reason. She found a Murano glassware shop and went all misty-eyed and wistful. "We have a day at Venice coming up during the week," I said hastily. A few day's reprieve for the wallet then... That night after our evening meal at the hotel we and our fellow travellers on the Leger tour would be going on a speedboat trip after dark on the lake. We were going to call at the first town to the south on the banks of the lake: Limone.

Lake Garda and Northern Italy, 2003 Index

Night Time In Riva

Thursday 16 August 2012. The rain stopped after about an hour and it was so warm that ten or fifteen minutes later you couldn't tell it had rained at all.

We ate our evening meal in the hotel's open air dining area. They had a promenade restaurant with tables on the Promenade by the lake side and then a glass wall separated the space reserved for hotel guests. The space was open to the sky, but with large canvas blinds that could be drawn to shelter diners from rain if needs be.

We didn't rush the meal and so by the time we ventured out again it was almost fully dark. The temperature was still well into the 30s. The photo shows the castle La Rocca from the north. I was standing on the edge of a piazza or square, set above the Promenade which comes behind La Rocca as the moat is connected to the lake. La Rocca is a museum these days and perhaps more welcoming than it may have been in days gone by.

On the edge of the piazza is a pond and a row of small foot-high fountains, lit from underneath. Very effective.

On the north west corner of the piazza is this fountain with a statue of a young naked girl or nymph, very reminiscent of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid. Or - as I've never been to Copenhagen - very reminiscent of what I think the Little Mermaid looks like... but with legs...

Via Lipella, leading off the piazza from behind the fountain of the naked girl. The streets are all much of a muchness in fact - warm, narrow, partially blocked by tables and chairs and people eating, lit as much by shop lights as street lights, made more dangerous by hurtling cyclists clad in matching lycra and with determined faces. As far as they are concerned, pedestrians and targets are pretty much the same thing...

Most of the touristy shops seemed to stay open late. This is an Italian "offy" with a small selection of wines for you to try!

And the souvenir and pottery shops were all still open. But it is just wonderful. Had we not been on our feet all day we could have walked around for hours. As it was we walked a few streets and thought "Stuff it, I need a drink..." and we ended up at a gelateria called Cristallo, who gained a lot of our custom during the week! This is the same gelateria where we were when it rained in the last entry. If you go there, give them a try.

The main piazza and Via Concordia. There was always something to watch around it. Either there was a concert going on in the piazza itself or in front of one of the hotels and bars that surrounded it on three sides.

It had an old clock tower that rang the hour and with a different bell rang the quarter, half, and three quarter hours. The bells echoed off the buildings so you always got a double strike!

Fey-like blue lights shot into the air and then floated down slowly. The latest fad. A small missile and a catapult with sails at one end that as it fell opened and spun round, slowing the descent. Presumably they had batteries for the light. Very beautiful and very hypnotising! Several nights I went to bed with a crick in my neck from watching them. Every night we turned down several eager sellers. They looked great when five or six rose into the air in quick succession. They would look a bit silly just the one being shot into the Blackpool sky by a near 60 year old... It didn't put the sellers off - they asked me every night and sometimes every half hour...

Our favourite warm drink by the way was a latte machiatto. Don't ask for a "latte" in Italy and expect to get what Costa Coffee would give you. Latte means milk - so that's what you would get... A latte machiatto is a weak latte coffee that was served slightly hotter than we remembered. The Italians always used to serve them just lukewarm - it's a warm country, they don't drink many hot drinks. But perhaps they have had so many complaints that they've shrugged and gone over to the way the crazy Brits want! Certainly we used to laugh at cafes when a voice in our own native tongue said indignantly "It's cold, this!!!"

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