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

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

To Riva del Garda, 2003

Tuesday 29 June 2003. We fly out from Manchester to Verona, Italy, from where we are picked up by coach transfer to our holiday destination for the week: Lake Garda.

It's not an early flight so by the time we get there we are tired, hungry and wanting to do very little except find the hotel and something to eat.

Our hotel - the Hotel Portici - is behind the flags. In fact it's the pink building behind the flags, the yellow building to the left and the orange building to the left of that. We find we have a suite of rooms in the orange bit, overlooking a narrow street on the side of the building. Not just the en-suite bedroom we were expecting, but a small kitchen area and a sitting room too. We are booked in for evening meals anyway so the kitchen won't get used for anything more than making the occasional coffee!

There's time for a swift explore after our meal before we collapse into a bar and vegetate for a few hours before bed calls.

Wednesday 30 June 2003. Ferries go off from here down the full length of the lake, calling at just about every town that exists around the lake. However there's a short walk to the opposite side of the lake which is only about 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) or so wide at this end, with Riva being on the top left corner and a town called Torbole ("Tor-bow-lay") on the top right corner.

It's a very pleasant walk. Temperatures started climbing and didn't stop until they were in the mid 30s centigrade. About halfway between the two towns a river, the Fiume Sarca, flows into the lake and is crossed by a bridge.

We stopped and had a drink at the tables and I started a sketch but abandoned it... There'll be some later on! Take that as a warning... Incidentally, this being 2003, digital cameras were still only capable of producing small images and I've done quite a bit of work to sharpen them as much as I could. I did have my SLR film camera with me too, but used the digital most days.

In fact this was the digital. One of the first with a zoom function! Most people still hadn't seen one at all - it was astonishing to be able to see your photo straight away on the back screen of the camera as soon as it was taken.

Anyway, I'm digressing... As the morning wore on and the temperatures rose, the shingle beaches of the lake started to fill up with sunbathers. Quite a liberated place - you wouldn't see some of those sights on Blackpool beach I can tell you!

A regatta of wind surfers is under way and attracts a few spectators. We are nearing Torbole but we'll have a look at that in the next article.

Lake Garda and Northern Italy, 2003 Index