Moonlight Cruise to Limone

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.

Lake Garda and Northern Italy, 2003 Index

A Week at Lake Garda, Northern Italy, August 2012

My record of a week's holiday at Lake Garda in northern Italy, staying at the Hotel Sole in Riva del Garda at the top of the lake.

Each place of interest is shown on its own separate article, reached by clicking/tapping the eleven photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.

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Limone, Lake Garda

Monday 20 August. Once again we are up to catch the 9:00am ferry from Riva, sailing down Lake Garda to Limone.

It's the first stop on the ferry's way to Malcesine. We arrive at Limone after 40 minutes of pleasant cruising down the lake and arrive to an almost deserted landing stage. Once the ferry is tied up to the jetty though, people start to appear from where they have been hiding from the sun!

Limone is spectacular in that the sheer cliffs fall almost vertically into the lake. Here tunnels have been blasted through one section of cliff to make a throughway from one side of Limone to the other. Shops occupy caverns within the tunnel.

We make our way through the shops with only a few near monetary losses and have our morning intake of latte machiatto at this cafe bar.

It had some wonderful small octagonal lamps that I had to work into a photograph.

From where we are we have a good view of the lake and watch the ferries come and go whilst we have our drink. The small piazza where we are has a fountain and a small viewpoint with benches.

Then it's back into another row of shops. Fran's purse is jumping in her pocket, desperate to get out and fling money around... She stops to touch a leather jacket - as an ex-leather worker she can't walk past a leather shop without both breathing in deeply and casting a critical eye over every piece. Luckily this time it is just touch and go...

We pass a museum of tourism that looks as though it might be diverting for a few minutes but as I've rushed Miss Franny past the shops, she is not going to be tempted by a museum...

We come to a wide promenade and stroll along enjoying the sunshine that is cranking up the heat and encouraging tiny beads of perspiration to form and roll down my back. I hate it when my hair gets all flat and plastered to my head... well... I seem to remember that I do...

It really is hot. We sit down for a moment with a limonate - a lemonade. Very refreshing. It is decided that I can go in the museum on my own, leaving Fran free to go looking at the shops.

"Take your time..." says Miss Franny, "no need to rush in this heat..." Oh dear... this sounds expensive...

The locally produced drink is limoncello, sometimes called limoncina, a lemon based liqueur packaged in a range of bottles some of which are shaped like the lake as seen from above or on a map.

I go into the museum. It has a few 3D exhibits and a whole host of old photographs, tourism adverts and posters and snippets of history about the lake's past including industries and the ferries. The exhibits include old cash tills, marked in Lira and quite nostalgic for anyone who, like me, has spent part of their working life in a shop. There is a jug and ewer set on a stand, a reminder of hotel rooms (or any bedroom) in the days before running water.

There's a huge book of clippings from when the James Bond film crew descended to film the car chase from Quantum of Solace that opens the film. A few show a crane fishing a rather banged up Aston Martin out of the lake near Torbole… Whoops!

We head back to the landing stage to check on times. The Brescia is approaching. As the engines rev a thick plume of smoke comes from her and we can see that it is passing through the space occupied by passengers. We decide to have lunch and then go back...

The ferry turns to go. You can see the haze of black smoke on her left hand side. Standing in the sun, reading the timetables, we realise why everyone chooses to find some shade rather than queue for the ferries!

And on the way back to Riva, there's a good view of the road tunnels, right at the bottom of the photo. It is through these that Daniel Craig as 007 James Bond, throws his Aston Martin about in a desperate chase and gun battle with the baddies! The tunnels and roads were made by Mussolini's army during the 1930s.

When we get back to Riva, we see that a stage is being set up for a concert. We hear the orchestra whilst we are eating our evening meal in the hotel and as we eagerly arrive at the piazza to catch the end of the concert - they reach it...

We hang about in hope that the orchestra might come back - as no one was starting moving equipment or instruments away. However when they did come back they played the quieter bits of Scheherezade that you just couldn't hear at the back of the square with everyone talking and Italian mothers screaming at children. Ho hum!

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Ferry to Malcesine

Saturday 18 August. We take the ferry down Lake Garda from Riva to Malcesine.

The nine o'clock ferry from Riva is the G.Zanardelli, a paddle steamer that is so beautiful it deserves - and will get - an entry all to itself in a day or two. Meanwhile Fran stretches out as at this hour we do not have too many fellow travellers!

I always think that the view of Riva from Lake Garda is one of the most beautiful bits of scenery on Earth. Who could fail to fall in love with a view like that?

The nine o'clock ferry does not cross the lake to Torbole, but instead immediately heads southwards down the lake towards its first stop at Limone. This takes 40 minutes and the time is spent relaxing, drinking in the views and feeling the breeze in your face. There's a set of dots floating in the sky in the distance and we wonder what they are until we get closer and can make them out properly.

They turn out to be the large canopies of kite surfers. These criss-cross the lake at a few points but these are whizzing to and fro in front of our path and seem almost suicidally eager to get as close to our bows as possible, like birds darting in front of your car down a country lane. The G.Zanardelli may be an old ship, but there is nothing wrong with its hooter, which frightens us to death never mind the kite surfers!

And then the imposing cliffs of Limone. The first sight of Limone is of the terraces of stone with pillars rising as though to support a roof. These are lemon terraces. Limone does not grow all that many lemons now, but in the past these groves were filled with trees and produced some of the largest lemons you can imagine. Nothing like the small weedy things we get in England! They are like small rugby balls! You will find some on the markets and shop fronts in Limone.

The G.Zanardelli hooter blasts again briefly to let the shore staff know to leave the ticket office and stand by to receive the next group of tourists. There's a sizeable crowd of people waiting to board, armed to the teeth with cameras, sun tan lotion, excited children and aged mothers. The Italians have far more aged mothers than aged fathers it would seem... They swarm onto the ferry, jostling for places against the rail where they can be photographed with Limone as the backdrop.

"Bella!" enthuses one daughter as she snaps for posterity a wrinkled 80-year-old, clad in a skirt matched (I say this loosely) with a bikini top that has a rather optimistic cup size. What used to be her breasts hang into it and curl back up in the bottom of the cups, the nipples pointing vertically at the sky. Behind me a young man leans over the rail to be sick into the lake...

For the good of my health and the retention of my breakfast I try to concentrate on the lakeside scenery of Limone. There, for instance, is the bar cafe we sat in, in 2004 with my own mother, who would not be told to stop flapping away at a hovering wasp until she did connect and managed to knock it out of the sky and straight into her glass of wine... Ah... we're off again!

The crossing (for Malcesine is on the eastern side of the lake) from Limone to our final destination takes a further 25 minutes. We are now on a quite crowded boat and there are people to watch - and avoid watching - and a new set of kite surfers to negotiate.

Malcesine has a castle set prominently on a huge jutting rock by the lakeside and this is what you look at to gauge how close you are. The G.Zanardelli will turn at this point and return to Riva so we sail past the landing stage and turn to come back to it. The ramps clatter onto the side of the boat and we are herded off and onto the terra firma of Malcesine (say it "Mal-chess-sin-ay" with the accent on the second syllable).

The first thing you have to do is to watch your ferry depart. The side paddles of the G.Zanardelli churn the water from blue to white and she pulls away from the landing stage, leaving you to the tender mercies of Malcesine for a few hours.

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