La Dolce Vita Part 1
Trip Start
May 24, 2005
1
9
25
Trip End
Ongoing
Lago di Garda,
Italy
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Childhood memories of leafing through the Sunday Times travel section, running fingers over pictures of hot blue skies and terracotta-peppered hills, eleven-year old brains calculating the kind of salary needed to afford the week long itinerary of Italian riviera elegance.
The dreams were still there (even if the desire for a package tour had died a death) as we flicked through pitch-black tunnels gouged out of the rocks along the eastern coast of Lake Garda, old film-reel images of the lake chattering past through arched windows.
Limone sul Garda. The name conjures up the thick yellow scent of citrus juices. And there it was in the books we scanned through on our two-hour stop-over in Milan: a three * town of character, with ancient cobbled streets and lemons galore..
Malcesine from the water
.Alas, our first bitter taste of this mecca for sandalled German tourists and retired and/or convalescing Italian criminals came as the coach dropped us off by a small petrol pump (which was 'geoffnet') on the road of death. We later saw a tiny kitten felled to eternal sleep on the same stretch of road, that happened also to be the entrance to the campsite. After congratulating ourselves on having run the gauntlet and survived unscathed, we pitched the tent and went in search of lemons.
Ah. Gullible travellers we. The last lemons were frozen out of existence in 1927 - at a guess right before the town started promoting itself as a tourist destination to the German middle classes. According to the brochure handed out at the town museum (a few broken spades and the few remaining specimens of the town's eponymous tree) lemon production had been suffering for many decades prior to the final blow. But, catching on to the digital imagery boom, the tourist authorities have mastered the art of adding whole branches of the fruit to their postcard images...
Good things to say about the place: great for learning German; fab for weinkellers and a slap-up fruhstuck
Through the walls of the castle at Malcesine
. The doctor's not bad either (Eoghan managed to slice his wrist open with a tent peg after trying to unbend it using brute force) and the people at the campsite were amenable. Ah, and as the first five pages of the town's promotional brochure will tell you - it is the home of a few dozen people who will never suffer from cholestorol.Through our binoculars we could see that the other side of the lake was - literally and metaphorically - infintely greener. A ten-minute boat ride took us up to Malcesine, a castled town where the German poet Goethe spent a night 300 years ago: the locals have been dining off the story ever since. The cobbled streets here really do wind up and down, and the restaurants, gelateria and even the campsite - with a view of the castle - are charming. Recommended features: the castle and it's museum (with stories such as the one about the sinking of a Venetian ship at Garda), watching the sun set over Limone, the cable car to the heights of Monte Baldo from where you can strike out in a number of directions and, on a clear day, see into Austria from the ridge.
But basta! On we go to Verona, the town of Shakespeare. It's quite divine, even if Juliet's balcony presents a rather interesting fusion of the ancient and modern, with Renaissance architecture casting a shadow over walls covered in chewing-gummed messages of love and graffitied hearts and arrows.
The archaelogical museum behind the Roman theatre contains enough to keep you ahh'ing for a while. And the street entertainers (the ones who stand still for hours) and ice creams top it all off nicely.
