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.
Tuesday 21 August 2012. It's our last day in Italy and we decide to take the ferry back to Malcesine for the morning.
It's a last trip on G.Zanardelli, the paddle ferry, which drops us off on time just over an hour after leaving Riva.
We follow our footsteps of earlier in the week and arrive at the castle, having pressed ourselves to one side to allow a little blue golf buggy bearing yet another bride and groom come past on their way up to the castle for their wedding. I'm not sure where these came from, but we were spared having to listen to the speeches for this one over our evening dinner!
An art gallery near the castle. Not having a window turned out to be no problem at all... I was surprised really at the scarcity of art galleries and artists. The place is really made for painters. In Cornwall in England you trip over their easels all the time and every second shop is an art gallery, yet here, with all the lovely scenery and all the good weather, I don't think I saw anyone other than myself sketching or painting all week! Very strange!
Maybe the artists were all indoors, painting ceilings? We walked past this beautiful hall on our way back down the hill. At the far end was a glorious view of the lake, but the difference in lighting levels outdid the camera's best efforts! I'm not sure what this place was, but the door was open and inviting and I allowed myself to be invited!
A Kodak sign! Snap them while you can... Technology is wonderful - but it has consequences for anyone who worked in areas being obliterated either through alternative digital ways of working or through automation.
We spend the morning and have our lunch in Malcesine at the rear of the little square harbour.
Sitting to dine al-fresco with a pizza followed by a fruit-laden ice cream dish, being entertained all the time by the arrival and departure of ferries and the goings on in the little harbour is a lovely way to spend an hour or so!
Then we catch the ferry back to Riva via Limone and Torbole, passing by our hotel, the Hotel Sole.
We arrive back to dock next to the Brescia. We spend the rest of the afternoon lazing and reading, drinking Aperol Spritzes and then heading back to the hotel to pack for tomorrow's very early start.
Saturday 18 August 2012. Well we had a full post just about the ferry trip here so I'd better make this one as interesting as I can!
Luckily there is enough in Malcesine (say it Mal-chess-in-ay with the accent on the che bit) to look at and ponder over.
The ferry landing stage is next to a very small but quite busy harbour. A fairly large masted ship does one hour trips (under motor not under sail) and another firm hires speedboats by the hour. Not the English seaside town idea of speedboats either. They look the real thing! And are priced as such. The basic one will set you back fifty euros for an hour, but I expect that the posing value and a chance to thrash it about on the huge lake for an hour makes it better value than, say, a three-minute roller coaster ride.
Malcesine's castle is perhaps best seen from the lake itself, but that shouldn't put you off walking up the hill through the narrow streets to get there. The host on the airport shuttle who brought us from Verona Airport on Wednesday had told us the castle was the setting for an unbelievable number of weddings a year. I think he said 800!
One such was going on because a little blue golf buggy decked out in flowers and a bride and groom tootled past us as we walked up the narrow cobbled streets towards it. Once you get to the castle, there's probably going to be a queue for the tiny viewpoint under the castle overlooking the lake.
But it is so, so worth waiting to catch this beautiful viewpoint. Turning the other way to look up at the castle is not the best view of it so people tend not to stay here a long time, blocking your access.
A glimpse of one of the narrow streets. This one is at least on the level. Others seem to have been built more with mountain goats in mind, but perhaps I exaggerate a little here.
We came to a small piazza halfway up a hill with the bar cafe shown above. We stopped for a drink and whilst we waited for it to come, the sketchpad came out and I spent 45 minutes capturing the essence of the piazza.
Our latte machiattos had long gone and a beer seemed a good idea after a while... I left the cobbles to do once I got home. They took at least half as long to draw in as the rest of the picture!
Fran disappeared into a jewellery shop to admire the Venetian glass and I got bored enough to start getting all arty-farty, photographing colours and textures.
The shot of the shop front and the fruit by the way is not quite what it seems as this was a pottery shop and all the fruit... isn't fruit...!
And so back eventually to the harbour area and some lunch. Halfway through another wedding party came down and onto one of the boats for their photos to be taken, whooping and looking like they were having a good time.
In fact when we got back to Riva that night this same party had taken over the bulk of the dining area - they were staying at our hotel. Which meant we had to listen to the speeches... The father of the bride's speech was nowhere near as good as mine... Five years on and still some of Eddie's friends and family mention it to me... [blush] Anyway, Rosie and Rich, (Rich?!? Could you not find anyone called 'Jim'?) I wish you a good long and happy life together.
Meanwhile we are still in Malcesine despite that swift bit of future gazing. After dinner we decided to walk it off a bit rather than sit an hour and a half on a ferry so we walked south, finding more shops and a lakeside view missed by many visitors who tend to walk north from the harbour.
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.
