A series of articles about our first visit to Lake Garda in northern Italy. Staying at Riva del Garda, we would travel around the lake to various towns, visit both Venice and Verona, ride ferries down the lake, a tram in Renon and cable cars in the Dolomite mountains.
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to each of the articles. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Monday 5 July 2003. We were spending our last full day in Italy around Lake Garda itself.
Having started in Riva at the far northen end of the lake, we had travelled by coach to Gardone, two-thirds of the way down and then by fast boat to Sirmione where we found ourselves at the start of this article written twenty and a half years later... The well in the photo was our group meeting point for later on.
We had an hour or so to explore the town - let's go!
Sirmione is one of the most popular spots on Lake Garda. It sits quite strangely on the end of a very thin promontory that sticks out into the lake for 3.3 km (2.1 miles) from halfway along the southern edge of the lake. Unlike the northern edge which is just 3 km (2 miles) from one side to the other, the southern bank of the lake is 18 km (11 miles) across.
The town itself is large enough to walk round and enjoy the shops and cafes and of course the fabulous Italian gelateri ice creams. It enjoys a well laid out street system and weather that allows for a generous riot of colour from window boxes, flower beds and large amounts of purple bougainvillea growing on the walls of houses and shops.
Sirmione also has beaches, something denied to the more northern of Lake Garda's towns where the mountainsides drop steeply in cliff faces into the lake.
Dominating the town is the Scaligeri castle. Built from 1277 CE onwards on the very edge of the lake it was meant to protect the harbour where the Scaliger fleet was based. It has the swallowtail merlons that we saw in Verona on the walls.
The castle is surrounded by a moat that on one side is formed by the lake itself.
Trying to storm this castle would involve a waterborne invasion, or an awkward half climb, half tightrope walk from the harbour wall. Or require an army of very good jumpers...
Legitimate access was by drawbridges. One of these has since been replaced with a load-bearing stone bridge,
To my inexpert eye it looks like the two beams would swing down from an upright position with the castle end of the drawbridge permenantly attached in place and the land side swinging downwards until the far end rested on the opposite approach road.
No such problems for visitors in 2003. Top right is a bell tower rising high above the castle. Presumably this would ring out if anything alarming was spotted approaching either from the lake or up the promontory.
Nothing alarming about this approaching loveliness... As James Bond might have said (in The Spy Who Loved Me about someone I've counted as a friend now for 26 years), "What a beautiful craft ... such sleek lines!"
Monday 5 July 2003. Our last full day in Italy dawned with the prospect of a trip around Lake Garda.
Early morning in Riva del Garda and already the sun was up, out, and shouting for us to come and get ourselves burnt to a crisp!
The ferry boats had yet to start, although most of our ride around the lake today would be on the coach. Lake Garda is 30 miles long. To take one of the slow ferries down to the bottom of the lake and back is an all day adventure with not much chance of getting off at all. The ferries criss-cross the lake from side to side in a zig-zag and apart from a couple of hydrofoils are not the quickest things on the water. Neither are some of them particularly well-furnished for comfort. So it would be a full day of breathing in diesel fumes on an open deck to do this by boat.
So we pile onto the coach and find that Christina and her party are already onboard with us. Christina, you may remember, was our Leger guide from a trip to Amsterdam a couple of years previously. I don't know whether there were no "characters" in her party, but anyway she came to sit with us most of the time as our own guide was doing most of the spiel on the coach's microphone. At the northern end of the lake a lot of the road is burrowed into the cliff face with windows opening to the view. They are featured in the second of Daniel Craig's James Bond films: A Quantum of Solace. Here we are overlooking Limone.
This is Gardone. This far down the lake (about two thirds of the way from top to bottom) the mountains have been tamed and are rolling hills of green grass or tree covering rather than sheer walls of rock.
Gardone, also called Gardone Riviera, is aimed well and truly at the tourist. There was a beautiful aspect of the lake from a well kept promenade that had plenty of colour from flower beds and more importantly lots of benches to sit upon.
There was the smallest of harbours, scarce the width of two boats with a harbour wall to protect the boats just in case of a storm out on the water. Poles painted in blue and white barbers' stripe spirals provided mooring points and the sleek motor boat at the entrance to the harbour was, though we didn't realise it at the time, waiting for us!
Mid morning drinkies. The temps are up in the high 30s. Fran opts for the delicious latte machiatto but I've gone for an ice cold cola.
Whilst we were sat having the drinks I sketched the curve of the coast - well, lakeside but it seemed like a coast! Christina said "I didn't know you were an artist!" but I said "Well you took us through the Red Light District too fast... "
Then it was time to get on the boat. We were heading for Sirmione at the southern end of the lake. We sat at the front of the boat with Christina who had made our Amsterdam trip so much fun.
The boat took us close up to one of Garda's islands where the millionaires have their playground. If I were ever to become a millionaire (not likely so please don't hold your breath...) this is definitely a place where I would like one of my mansions to be...
We reach Sirmione and will save the sights of that town for the next article!
Wednesday 30 June 2003. We are on the fifth article already of this holiday series about our trip to Lake Garda and we are still on the first day!.
We had joined a Leger group, though we had flown out from the UK to Verona instead of going all the way by coach. Tonight after our evening meal we were going to have a moonlight cruise on the lake. The moon wasn't quite out yet but it would be later...
Limone is the first ferry stop south of Riva, although many ferries call at Torbole first on the opposite top corner of the lake. We were not on one of the usual ferries this night though. We are on a fast boat - Speedy 1. Speedy 2 is picking up another Leger group from somewhere... Between Riva and Limone is this small inlet where a river flows down from the mountains into the lake. When I say "down" I mean it falls in a dirty great waterfall not far into the inlet. However it is so dark in there that you are lucky to see it. So I've brightened up the bit with the waterfall in it on this photo. Even so I wouldn't blame you for not being able to recognise it as such...
Limone sul Garda is half built at the bottom of the cliff face and half excavated out of it! Its name comes from the crops of lemons that are grown and harvested during the summer months. There is a summer population of 10,000. In winter with no visitors and very few lemons, this dwindles to just one thousand.
We landed and are to have a stop off here for an hour or so. A chance to explore and also a chance for it to go dark and for the moon to come out! Speedy 2 arrived so then there were two groups of us frantically trying to find our guides and/or members of our own party...
Half of them seemed to have wandered off anyway and either some of them had become very fluent in Italian and German or some residents and random tourists had intermingled anyway. Time to shrug shoulders and find our own way about! No sooner were the shoulders shrugged than a lost French couple interrupted us to see if we knew where they were meant to be... I pointed helpfully to the opposite side of the lake.
This was the excavated bit. A street of shops had been hewed out of the rock at the foot of the cliffs. This place had a rather weighty ceiling and we walked quickly just in case...
There was of course, a fair amount of climbing to do also! We had been told there was a church and for some reason decided to find it.
In any case I wanted to climb up a little in order to get some photos of the lake and lights of its towns from a position slightly less populated by other people taller than me!
We found the church and began to regret walking up the hill as it turned out to be decidedly uninteresting and closed. The locals would be very unlucky if a horde of vampires suddenly descended... Are vampires repelled by dress shops? Or is it just me...?
We climbed as high as we felt we had time for and lo and behold here is our guide. She had charged off up the hill to get away from the more stupid half of Speedy 1's passengers who, no matter how many times she had told them before landing, followed her to ask "What time do we have to be back at the boat and where is it?" When no stupid questions came from us she was quite happy to take our photo!
And before long it was time to find our boat again. There were now two of them of course and Speedy 2 looked identical to ours. My trained eye however spotted the name Speedy 1 painted in large letters on the bow of the boat and we climbed up to the open top deck to get to know a few of our fellow passengers a bit better.
There was Kell and his wife Denise who were teaching in England for a year on an elongated stay away from their home in New Zealand and a long-haired genial chap called Andy, a few years older than us with his wife Margaret. He somehow got us into a conversation about the 1950s/60s comedian Freddie Frinton who I just about remembered from childhood. Freddie's act saw him playing a most convincing and hilarious drunk on-stage and he had a prop cigarette which was broken in the middle so that it dangled downwards and swung about from his mouth as he talked.
It was by now pitch dark on the lake and at the front of an open deck on a speedboat, we were just a tad from freezing to death. So by the time we were back at Riva it was with a bit of relief that we got back onto terra firma and headed for the hotel.
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.
