The History of Lake Garda: Poets, Castles and Galleys

Hello, and welcome. Tonight, we are going to spend a long, slow evening beside the largest lake in Italy. Lake Garda.

There is nothing you need to remember, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story drift in and out, like the sound of small waves against a stone harbour wall. If you fall asleep before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this is for.

Lake Garda lies in the north of Italy, where the great plain of the river Po meets the first walls of the Alps. It is a long lake, about fifty-two kilometres from end to end, a little more than thirty miles. At its widest, in the south, it stretches almost seventeen kilometres from shore to shore. And in places it is very deep. Its greatest depth is three hundred and forty-six metres, more than a thousand feet of cool, still water.

The lake is shared by three regions. The western shore belongs to Lombardy, and the province of Brescia. The eastern shore belongs to the Veneto, and the province of Verona. And the narrow northern tip, tucked between the mountains, belongs to Trentino.

If you could look down on it from high above, you would see that it has a curious shape. In the north it is slender, almost like a river or a fjord, squeezed between steep walls of rock. Then, as it runs south, it slowly opens, wider and wider, until it spreads out among soft green hills, like a great silver bowl. One Italian poet, Giosuè Carducci, called it exactly that. A great silver cup.

There are five small islands in the lake. The largest is the Isola del Garda, near the western shore. The others are tiny: San Biagio, the Isle of Olives, the Isle of Dreams, and Trimelone.

Around the shore are dozens of little towns. Peschiera and Desenzano in the south. Salò, Gargnano and Limone in the west. Riva and Torbole at the northern end. And on the eastern shore, Malcesine, Torri, Garda, Bardolino and Lazise, with their harbours full of small boats, and their old stone towers looking out across the water.

Many of the pictures you will see tonight were taken on my own visits to the lake. Some in the quiet grey light of a February winter, when the cafés were closed and the water was perfectly still. And some in the long, warm days of August, from the top of an old castle tower.

An English writer, Richard Bagot, who knew these lakes well more than a century ago, wrote that Lake Garda was, in many ways, by far the most beautiful, as it is the most imposing, of all the Italian lakes. We do not need to decide whether he was right. We only need to sit by the water for a while.

Tonight, we are going to travel slowly through time. We will begin long ago, before there were any villages here at all, when the whole valley lay under ice. We will visit the first villages, built on wooden posts at the water's edge. We will meet a Roman poet coming home, a young queen held prisoner in a fortress above the lake, and the lords of a great family whose emblem was a ladder. We will watch the Republic of Venice drag a fleet of warships over the mountains. And at the very end, on a September morning in the year seventeen eighty-six, we will meet a traveller from Germany, sitting in a castle courtyard with his sketchbook, about to get into a little bit of trouble.

So, get comfortable. Let your shoulders drop a little. Let your breathing slow down. And let's begin at the very beginning, in the cold, a very long time ago.

Long before there were towns or harbours or olive trees, the valley of Lake Garda was filled with ice.

During the great cold ages of the past, glaciers flowed down from the high Alps to the north. They moved slowly, grinding and scraping the rock beneath them. One of these great rivers of ice came down the valley where the lake lies today. It was enormous. Near the point of San Vigilio, on the eastern shore, the ice was about one thousand one hundred metres thick. If you had stood on the valley floor, there would have been more than a kilometre of ice above your head.

Scientists still discuss exactly how the basin was made. It seems that, millions of years earlier, rivers had already cut a deep valley here. Then the glaciers came, again and again, and widened and deepened it, shaping it into the long trough we see today. The rock floor of the lake lies far below the level of the sea. Near Malcesine, it is some five hundred metres below sea level, hidden beneath the water and beneath thick layers of ancient clay.

When the ice reached the open plain in the south, it could go no further. It spread out, and slowly melted at its edges. And as it melted, it dropped all the stones and gravel and sand it had been carrying, in long curving ridges. These ridges are called moraines. Today they form the gentle hills around the southern end of the lake, arranged in great arcs, one inside another, like the rings of an amphitheatre. The outer rings are older, left by an earlier advance of the ice. The inner rings are younger, left by the last.

When the climate warmed, and the glacier finally drew back into the mountains, the meltwater filled the hollow it had left behind. And that was the beginning of the lake.

Today, the water still arrives mostly from the north. The main river that feeds the lake is the Sarca, which comes down from the high mountains of the Adamello and the Brenta, and enters the lake near Torbole. And the water leaves from the south, through a single river, the Mincio, which flows out at Peschiera and wanders down through the plain to join the Po.

Along the eastern shore rises a long mountain ridge called Monte Baldo. It runs for about forty kilometres beside the lake, and its highest point reaches two thousand two hundred and eighteen metres. In winter its upper slopes are white with snow, while down at the water's edge, the air is soft and mild.

Because the lake is so large and so deep, it holds the warmth of summer and gives it back slowly through the winter. And the mountains to the north shelter it from the coldest winds. So the shores of Lake Garda enjoy a climate that feels almost Mediterranean. Olive trees grow here, and cypresses, and palms, and even lemons, far further north than you might expect.

The lake also has its own winds, as regular as a clock. In the night and the early morning, a wind called the Pelèr blows down from the north, and lasts until about the middle of the day. Then, in the afternoon, a wind from the south called the Ora rises over the water, and blows until the sun goes down. In the old days, the boatmen of the lake planned their journeys around these two winds. Sailing south in the early hours, and coming home in the afternoon.

Imagine that rhythm for a moment. The north wind in the dark. A pause around midday, when the water goes still. And then the soft southern breeze through the long afternoon, while the shadows lengthen and the light turns gold.

If you walk along the waterfront of the little town of Garda, on the eastern shore, and look down at the paving stones, you may notice something curious. Pressed into the pale red stone, here and there, are spiral shapes. Coils, like the shell of a snail, but larger, and flatter, and very old.

These are ammonites. And they are a reminder that, long before the ice, long before the mountains, this whole region lay beneath an ancient sea.

Ammonites were sea creatures, cephalopods, often described as distant relatives of the octopus and the squid. They lived inside coiled shells, and they drifted and swam through the ancient seas for an immensely long time. When they died, their shells sank to the sea floor, and were slowly buried in fine mud.

The stone that holds them here is called Rosso Ammonitico. Red ammonite stone. It is a kind of limestone, made of countless layers of ancient sea-floor mud, pressed together and hardened over vast stretches of time. It formed during the period that geologists call the Jurassic, on a raised platform beneath the sea. Its warm red colour comes from iron, which rusted gently in the water as the mud settled.

Something rather beautiful happened to the shells. After they were buried, the shells themselves slowly dissolved away. But the mud had already filled them, and hardened inside them. So what we see today, in many of these stones, is not the shell at all. It is a cast of the inside of the shell, like a mould left behind when the original has gone.

Then, over many millions of years, the movements of the earth pushed the old sea floor upwards, until it became the hills and mountains around the lake and around the city of Verona.

The stone is often called Verona marble, marmo rosso di Verona. In fact, it is not a true marble at all, but the name has stuck for centuries. It has been quarried since Roman times, especially in the hills of the Valpolicella, north of Verona. And it has a lovely range of colours. Most of it is red, from a deep red violet to a soft coral pink. But some of it is yellow, and some is even a pale green.

The Romans used it in Verona's great amphitheatre, the Arena, and in its theatre, and in the old stone bridge across the river Adige, the Ponte Pietra. In later centuries, it was carried down to Venice, and you can still find it in Saint Mark's Basilica and in the Doge's Palace. In Verona, it was used to pave the streets. So the people of the city have been walking on the floor of an ancient sea for a very long time.

I took some of tonight's pictures on a bright winter morning in the town of Garda, crouching down over the stones near the water. The ammonites were just lying there, underfoot, worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. Nobody seemed to pay them any attention at all.

It is a strange and peaceful thought. That creatures who swam in a vanished ocean are now resting quietly in a pavement by a lake, while people walk past with their shopping, and children run by, and the little boats knock gently against the harbour wall.

When the ice had gone, and forests had grown up on the hills, people came to live beside the lake. And some of them built their villages in a very particular way. They built them on posts.

All around the Alps, in the lakes and marshes of six different countries, archaeologists have found the remains of villages raised on wooden piles. Thousands of wooden stakes were driven into the soft ground at the edge of the water, and on top of them the people built platforms and houses. In the year two thousand and eleven, one hundred and eleven of these sites were listed together by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. Several of them lie around Lake Garda and in the hills nearby.

One of these villages lies at Peschiera, at the southern end of the lake, at a place called Belvedere. Today it is under the water, about two hundred and fifty metres from the shore. It covers more than twenty-two thousand square metres. Archaeologists have sampled about one thousand two hundred of its wooden posts. By studying them, they have learned that people lived here in two main periods, around four thousand years ago, and again a few centuries later. Among the things they found was a single ear of an ancient kind of wheat, called emmer, preserved because it had been burned.

At Peschiera, these remains were first noticed in the eighteen fifties, when the Austrians were strengthening the town's fortifications. At least seven villages on piles came to light.

Another site, Lucone, lies in the hills to the west of the lake. One of its villages was founded, according to the tree rings in its timbers, in the year two thousand and thirty-four before Christ. It was struck by a terrible fire and rebuilt, and it was abandoned some seventy years after it was founded. In the nineteen sixties, a dugout canoe made from a single oak trunk was found there. A boat carved from one tree, for travelling across still water.

At another site called Lavagnone, archaeologists found a plough from the early Bronze Age, which is thought to be one of the oldest in the world. And in the mountains near the northern end of Lake Garda, at the little lake of Ledro, a whole forest of ancient posts appeared in the year nineteen twenty-nine, when the water level was lowered for a power station. When the site was excavated, more than twelve thousand piles were found. Today there is a small museum there, with a reconstructed village beside the old site.

We do not know what these people called themselves, or what language they spoke. But we can imagine something of their days. The smoke from cooking fires drifting over the water in the morning. Fish caught in nets and traps. Small fields of grain on the hills behind the village. Tools of stone and wood, and later of bronze. And the dugout canoes, gliding slowly between the houses and the shore.

At night, the village would have been very quiet. Just the water moving gently beneath the floorboards, and perhaps the call of a bird out on the lake. And above, the same stars that shine over the lake tonight.

Long before it was called Lake Garda, the lake had another name. The Romans called it Benacus.

The name is probably older than the Romans. It may come from the language of the Celts, who lived in this region before Rome arrived, and it may mean something like horned, perhaps because of the long points and promontories that reach out into the water.

The Celtic people who lived around Verona and Brescia were called the Cenomani. They were Gauls, who had crossed the Alps from the north some time before. When Rome began to expand into northern Italy, the Cenomani chose, on the whole, to be friends rather than enemies. In the year two hundred and twenty-five before Christ, after the Gauls were defeated in a great battle at Telamon, the Cenomani became allies of Rome. The friendship was not always steady, but little by little, over the following generations, the whole region became Roman. In the year eighty-nine before Christ, the communities here received Latin rights, and later full Roman citizenship.

The country around the lake was divided into rural districts. One of them was named after the lake itself, the district of the Benacenses, the people of Benacus.

A great Roman road, the Via Gallica, ran across the south of the lake, past a little settlement where the Mincio flows out. The Romans called it Arilica. Today it is Peschiera. It was a place of boats and boatmen, and an inscription tells us that there was a guild of shipowners there. From here, goods could travel along the lake, and down the river, towards the plain.

In Roman times, some people saw the lake as more than water. The lake itself was imagined as a god, sometimes linked with Neptune, the god of the sea. An old tradition places a small temple to Benacus at the point of San Vigilio, on the eastern shore, and an inscription dedicated to him is kept today in a museum in Verona.

The most famous lines about the lake were written by the poet Virgil, in a long poem about farming and the Italian countryside, called the Georgics. Virgil was born near Mantua, on the river Mincio, the very river that flows out of Lake Garda. So this was, in a sense, his own water. In a passage praising the beauty of Italy, he speaks of its great lakes. In an English translation from nineteen sixteen, the lines read:

Or of our mighty lakes? Of thee, Larius, our greatest; and thee, Benacus, with the roaring, surging swell of the sea?

Larius was the Roman name for Lake Como. And Benacus, of course, is Lake Garda. Virgil had noticed something that every visitor notices sooner or later. That when the wind blows hard from the north, this lake can behave like the sea. Waves rise, and crash against the harbour walls, and spray flies over the promenades.

In another of his poems, the Aeneid, Virgil mentions the river Mincio itself, and calls it the child of Benacus, crowned with grey sedge. It is a gentle image. A slow river, flowing out of a great lake, with reeds and rushes along its banks, wandering away across the plain towards Mantua.

Many centuries later, a German traveller would come to this lake, look out at the waves, and think of those very lines of Virgil. But that is a story for the end of the night.

About two thousand years ago, a young man came home to the lake after a long journey. His name was Gaius Valerius Catullus, and he was a poet.

Catullus was born in Verona, into a wealthy and respected family. Scholars disagree a little about the exact years, but he probably lived from around eighty-four to around fifty-four before Christ. So his life was short, perhaps only thirty years or so. But the poems he left behind have been read and loved ever since.

As a young man, he spent much of his time in Rome, among poets and politicians and fashionable friends. Then, around the year fifty-seven before Christ, he travelled east, to the province of Bithynia, on the shores of the Black Sea, as part of the staff of a Roman governor named Memmius. He stayed there for about a year.

When it was over, he came home. And when he reached the lake, and saw the long, low peninsula of Sirmione stretching out into the water, he wrote one of the most beloved poems in the Latin language.

In a prose translation published in nineteen hundred and four, by Francis Warre Cornish, it begins like this:

Sirmio, bright eye of peninsulas and islands, all that in liquid lakes or vast ocean either Neptune bears: how willingly and with what joy I revisit you, scarcely trusting myself that I have left Thynia and the Bithynian plains, and that I see you in safety.

And then he goes on, in words that almost anyone who has ever come home after a long journey will understand:

Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labour of far travel we have come to our own home and rest on the couch we longed for.

At the end of the poem, he greets the place itself, as if it were an old friend. Welcome, lovely Sirmio, he says, and rejoice ye too, waters of the Lydian lake. He calls the lake Lydian because, in his time, people believed that the Etruscans, who had once lived in this region, had come long ago from Lydia, far away in the east.

In another poem, Catullus writes about the little ship that carried him home. He imagines it telling its own story, how it sailed from the furthest sea, even to this limpid lake. And now, he says, it rests quietly, growing old in peace.

There is also a small story about Catullus and Julius Caesar. Catullus, it seems, had written some rather rude verses about the great general. The Roman historian Suetonius tells us that Caesar knew perfectly well that these verses had damaged his reputation. And yet, when the poet apologised, Caesar invited him to dinner that very same day, and continued his usual friendly relations with Catullus's father. Caesar had been accustomed to staying as a guest in the father's house. We do not know exactly where. Tradition likes to imagine it was by the lake.

In the centuries after Catullus died, his poems were almost forgotten. The text we read today comes, it seems, from a single manuscript, which turned up in Verona around the year thirteen hundred and five. From that one fragile book, copied and recopied, his words came down to us.

So when you see the long thin spit of Sirmione reaching out into the water, you might think of him. A tired young man, home at last, putting down his bags, and resting on the couch he had longed for.

At the very end of the Sirmione peninsula, where the land rises a little before dropping into the lake, there are the ruins of a vast Roman building. For more than five hundred years, people have called it the Grotte di Catullo. The caves of Catullus.

They are not really caves, of course. When the ruins lay half buried and overgrown with green, the great ruined walls looked like caverns, and the name stayed.

The villa was built at the end of the first century before Christ, or the very beginning of the first century after. It was enormous. Its main plan measures about one hundred and sixty-seven metres by one hundred and five, and the whole site covers about two hectares. Because the rocky ground slopes down towards the lake, the builders had to construct massive supporting structures underneath, and cut deep into the rock itself, to hold up the level floors of the house above.

And what a house it must have been. There were long covered walkways with columns, called porticoes, where you could stroll in the shade. There was a terrace looking out over the water. There was a long covered passage along the western side, where one could walk out of the sun. There was a garden in the middle, and an immense cistern, more than forty metres long, to store water. Later, probably in the early second century, baths were added.

Some of the ruined rooms have been given names, handed down by local tradition or given by the first excavators. One is called the Hall of the Giants, perhaps because of its great size. Another is called the Cave of the Horse. And one, named after a window of three openings, is called the Window of Paradise. Standing there, with the blue water stretching away in three directions, it is easy to see why.

But did Catullus ever live here? Almost certainly not. In the year fourteen eighty-three, a writer named Marin Sanudo the Younger connected the ruins with the poet, and the idea was too lovely to give up. But the villa we see today was built after Catullus had died. It is possible that his family owned land on the peninsula, and that an earlier, smaller house stood somewhere nearby. But this great building belonged to someone else, someone very rich, whose name we do not know.

Even in the eighteen nineties, the English traveller Richard Burton looked at the ruins and remarked that they seemed too extensive to serve for the purpose. Too big, in other words, for a poet's country house.

The villa was lived in for about two centuries, and then it was abandoned, some time in the third century. Later, when times grew dangerous, the old walls became part of the defences of the peninsula, and the area was used for burials.

Large-scale excavations began in nineteen thirty-nine. Today the ruins belong to the Italian state, and there is a museum beside them. And around the old walls grow about one thousand five hundred olive trees, their silver-grey leaves moving in the breeze from the lake.

If you visit early in the morning, before the crowds arrive, the place is very peaceful. Lizards sun themselves on the warm Roman bricks. The water below is so clear that you can see the pale stones on the bottom. And the only sound is the wind in the olive trees, and the soft lap of the lake against the rocks.

The villa at Sirmione was not the only Roman house by the lake. Around the shores of Benacus, wealthy Romans built country estates, places to escape from the noise and heat of the cities.

At Desenzano, on the southern shore, there are the remains of another great villa. It was first built at the end of the first century before Christ, but the parts we can see today date mostly from the early fourth century after Christ, a much later time. It was discovered by chance in the year nineteen twenty-one. Its floors are covered with beautiful mosaics, small coloured stones set into pictures. There are scenes of hunting, and of the grape harvest, and there was a grand dining room with three rounded ends, whose floor is the best preserved of all. A courtyard was surrounded by more than twenty columns.

On the western shore, at Toscolano Maderno, there was another villa, built in the first century after Christ, and altered many times over the following four hundred years. An inscription found there suggests that it belonged to a family called the Nonii Arrii, and in particular to a man named Marcus Nonius Macrinus, who became consul in Rome in the year one hundred and fifty-four. The villa had a loggia facing the lake, and a long ornamental pool, forty-seven metres long. One can imagine the owner walking beside it in the evening, looking out at the water, far from the business of Rome.

But of course, most of the people who lived around the lake were not rich at all. They were farmers, and fishermen, and boatmen. They grew vines and olives on the hills. They carried goods along the lake in boats. And they fished.

The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, who was born at Como, not very far away, wrote an enormous encyclopedia about the natural world. And in it, he mentions Lake Benacus, and a strange thing that happened there every year. In a translation from eighteen fifty-five, by Bostock and Riley, it reads:

There is a lake called Benacus, in the territory of Verona, in Italy, through which the river Mincius flows. At the part of it whence this river issues, once a year, and mostly in the month of October, the lake is troubled, and the eels are heaped together by the waves, and rolled on by them in such astonishing multitudes, that single masses of them, containing more than a thousand in number, are often taken.

Pliny thought the autumn stars had something to do with it. The fishermen of Arilica, where the Mincio flows out of the lake, probably did not mind why. They had built special chambers in the bed of the river to catch the eels, and every autumn, when the storms came, they gathered their harvest.

The town of Peschiera still remembers this. Its coat of arms shows two silver eels.

Other traces of the Romans are scattered around the lake. The remains of field boundaries near Riva, laid out in the Roman way. An altar at Lazise. Fragments of stone, and coins, and pieces of pottery. And, here and there, an inscription naming someone who lived and worked by this water, long ago.

It is pleasant to imagine a Roman autumn evening by the lake. The vines on the hills turning red and gold. Wine being pressed. Boats coming in to the little harbours as the light fades. And down at the river mouth, the fishermen waiting by their eel traps, listening to the wind rising over the water.

Slowly, over several centuries, the Roman world in the west began to come apart. The peace of the empire gave way to uncertain times. Armies marched through northern Italy. And the people who lived around the lake began to think about walls and watchtowers.

Already in the year two hundred and sixty-eight, a Roman army under Claudius the Second, known as Claudius Gothicus, fought a battle near Lake Benacus against the Alamanni, a federation of Germanic peoples who had come into northern Italy. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the peninsula of Sirmione was fortified, and early in the fifth century its tip was cut off from the mainland by a channel, so that it became an island, easier to defend.

On the eastern shore, above the bay where the town of Garda now stands, there is a steep, rounded hill called the Rocca. In the fifth century, a fortress was built on top of it. Archaeologists have found coins there, including a small gold coin of the eastern emperor Zeno, and a round silver brooch decorated with eagles' heads, of the kind worn by the Goths.

Then, in the year five hundred and sixty-eight, a new people arrived in Italy. The Lombards. They came from beyond the Alps, and they settled across much of the north, and their kingdom lasted for two hundred years. Under the Lombards, the shores of the lake were divided between the duchies of Brescia, Verona and Trento.

The Lombards spoke a Germanic language. And in that language, there was a word, warda, which meant a guard, or a watch post. The fortress on the Rocca, keeping watch over the lake, came to be called by that name. Garda. The name first appears in writing in the year seven hundred and twelve.

Over the centuries, the name of the fortress and the town below it slowly spread to the whole lake. The old Roman name, Benacus, gradually gave way, though it still lives on in Italian as Benaco, and the lake became the Lake of Garda. So the whole great body of water takes its name from one fortress on a hill, a place of watching.

The last Lombard king was named Desiderius, and his queen was Ansa. Together they founded a monastery in Brescia in the year seven hundred and fifty-three. Queen Ansa also had a connection with Sirmione. There is a story, from the year seven hundred and sixty-two, that a nobleman of Sirmione killed one of her courtiers, and lost his lands as a punishment. Ansa then founded a small monastery on the peninsula.

But the Lombard kingdom did not last much longer. In the year seven hundred and seventy-four, Charlemagne, king of the Franks, captured the Lombard capital of Pavia after a long siege, and took for himself the title of King of the Lombards. In the same year, a document of Charlemagne granted Sirmione to a monastery far away in Tours, in France.

Life by the lake went on. Fishermen still went out in the early morning. Olive trees were planted on the sunny slopes, and by this time we find them mentioned in written records. Little churches were built in the villages. And the fortress on the Rocca of Garda kept looking out over the water, as it had for three hundred years.

In the spring of the year nine hundred and fifty-one, a young woman was brought, under guard, to the fortress on the Rocca of Garda. Her name was Adelaide. She was about twenty years old, and she was a queen.

Adelaide had been born in Burgundy, the daughter of King Rudolph the Second. As a girl, she had been married to Lothair, who was king of Italy. But in November of the year nine hundred and fifty, Lothair died suddenly, and Adelaide was left a widow, with a small daughter, in a dangerous world.

The crown of Italy passed to a powerful nobleman named Berengar, Marquis of Ivrea. Berengar wanted to make his position secure. And the surest way to do that, he thought, was to marry the young widowed queen to his own son, Adalbert. Adelaide refused.

So she was taken away and held captive. According to some historical sources, she was kept at the fortress of Garda from the nineteenth of April to the twenty-sixth of August, of the year nine hundred and fifty-one. Some older writers place her prison elsewhere, but in Garda the story of the captive queen is still told today.

How did she escape? Here the old stories differ, and grow a little more colourful with each telling. One version, recorded in the Catholic Encyclopedia of nineteen hundred and seven, says that she was rescued by a priest named Martin, who dug a subterraneous passage, by which she escaped, and remained concealed in the woods, her rescuer supporting her, meantime, by the fish he caught in the lake.

It is a lovely picture. A patient priest, digging a secret passage. And a hungry queen, hidden in the woods, living on the fish he caught in the lake, waiting for help to come.

Another account, by her contemporary biographer, Odilo of Cluny, says that she slipped away and hid for a time in the marshes nearby, before a priest brought her safely to a strong castle, probably Canossa, near Reggio. Whatever the exact route, she got away.

And then her fortunes changed completely. That same year, the German king Otto the First came down into Italy. He met Adelaide, and they were married at Pavia, before the end of the year nine hundred and fifty-one. Eleven years later, in the year nine hundred and sixty-two, Otto was crowned emperor in Rome, and Adelaide was crowned empress beside him.

She lived a long life, until the year nine hundred and ninety-nine, and she became one of the most important women of her age. After her death, she was honoured as a saint. In paintings, since the fourteenth century, she is sometimes shown holding a small ship. A quiet reminder, perhaps, of her escape across the water.

The fortress on the Rocca of Garda is long gone. Today the hill is covered with trees, and there are only a few traces of old walls among the oaks and the stones. A path winds up from the town, and from the top you can look out over the whole lake, wide and calm and blue.

From the waterfront below, the Rocca looks peaceful. A round green hill above the harbour. Swallows circle around it in summer. And on still evenings, its reflection lies upside down in the water, perfectly clear, until a little boat comes by and breaks it into a thousand trembling pieces.

As Christianity spread through northern Italy, the lake gathered its own saints and holy places, and the stories that grew around them.

The most beloved saint of this region is Zeno, who was bishop of Verona in the fourth century. He came from Mauretania, in north Africa, and in Verona he is still affectionately called the Moorish bishop. Very little is known for certain about his life. But many legends grew up about him. It was said that he loved to fish, and that he would sit quietly on the bank of the river Adige with his line in the water. So he became the patron saint of freshwater fishermen. In paintings and statues, he is often shown holding his bishop's staff, with a little fish hanging from it.

Above the town of Malcesine, high on the slopes of Monte Baldo, there is a small hermitage built into the mountainside, at more than eight hundred metres above sea level. It is the hermitage of Saints Benigno and Caro, two hermits who are said to have lived there in a cave, in the eighth or ninth century, far from the world, praying and looking down on the lake.

Legends cling to them, as they do to all hermits. One says that they were called down to Verona to carry the relics of Saint Zeno to his new church. Another says that the devil came to tempt them in the shape of a blackbird. Their feast is still celebrated each year at the end of July.

On the eastern shore, a long, wooded point reaches out into the water, called the Punta San Vigilio. It is named after Saint Vigilius, an early bishop of Trento, to the north of the lake. People had come to this point long before Christianity, too. Archaeologists have found traces from the Bronze Age there.

And at Bardolino, there are two very old churches. The first is the little church of San Zeno, dedicated, of course, to the fishing bishop of Verona. It was built in the time of the Carolingians, in the second half of the ninth century, and it is one of the few Carolingian buildings still standing in Italy. It is built in the shape of a cross, with vaulted ceilings, and inside it is cool and dim. It even survived a great earthquake in the year eleven hundred and seventeen, which damaged so many buildings across the region.

The other is the church of San Severo, built in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, on the site of an even older church. Its walls are painted with faded frescoes, scenes from the Book of Revelation, and stories of the True Cross. And beneath it, there is a small crypt.

The name of Bardolino itself first appears in a document of the year eight hundred and seven, in which King Pepin, a son of Charlemagne, gave a church of San Zeno at Bardolino to the great monastery of San Zeno in Verona.

If you step inside one of these little churches on a hot afternoon, the change is wonderful. The noise of the street fades away. Your eyes take a moment to adjust to the half-light. The air smells of old stone and candle wax. And for a while, you can sit on a wooden bench, and listen to the silence that has gathered there over a thousand years.

On the south-eastern shore of the lake, there is a little walled town called Lazise. Its name comes from the Latin word lacus, meaning lake. A town of the lake.

Lazise has a particular pride in its history. On the seventh of May, in the year nine hundred and eighty-three, the emperor Otto the Second, the son of Otto and Adelaide, granted the people of Lazise a charter. It gave them important rights. The right to collect tolls from boats and travellers passing through. Rights over transport, and over fishing in their waters. And, very importantly, the right to build walls and fortify their town.

With these privileges, the community of Lazise began to govern its own affairs. And so the people of Lazise like to say that their town was the first free commune in Italy. Historians might debate the exact meaning of that title, but it is a claim the town holds dear. About a century later, in the year ten seventy-seven, Henry the Fourth confirmed the town's exemptions once again.

The walls of Lazise are still there today, for the most part, with their towers rising at intervals. You enter the old town through one of its gates. There is the Porta San Zeno, on the eastern side. There is the Porta del Lion, to the south, named after the winged lion of Venice. And there is the Porta Nuova, the new gate, to the north, which bears a date: the twenty-first of May, thirteen seventy-six.

In one corner of the town, near the water, stands the castle, with its tall towers and battlements. It was built and strengthened by the Della Scala family, the lords of Verona, whom we will meet in a moment. The castle is privately owned and surrounded by a park, but its towers can be seen from all around, rising above the trees and the rooftops.

I first saw Lazise on a clear, cold morning in February. The sky was a deep winter blue, without a single cloud. The castle towers stood sharp against it, with the bare branches of the trees in front. And down by the little harbour, the boats were pulled up in rows, and the pastel-coloured houses, yellow and pink and pale orange, were reflected in water as smooth as glass.

There were almost no visitors. A few local people were walking their dogs along the waterfront. An old man was reading a newspaper on a bench in the sun. And out on the lake, the water was so clear that you could see the stones on the bottom, green and brown, shining in the light.

It is easy, on a morning like that, to imagine the town as it was a thousand years ago. Fishermen mending their nets on the shore. Boats arriving from across the lake, and paying their tolls at the harbour. The walls and towers keeping watch. And the people of Lazise, proud of their charter, managing their own small world beside the water.

In the year twelve hundred and sixty-two, a family began to rule the city of Verona who would leave their mark all around Lake Garda. They were called the Della Scala. In English, the name means "of the ladder", or "of the stair".

Nobody is quite sure where the name came from. One explanation connects it with the scaling ladders used in sieges. But whatever its origin, the family took the ladder as its emblem. On their seals and their coats of arms, you can see a ladder with five rungs. And on some of their emblems, the ladder is held up by dogs.

The dogs are a kind of joke, or a play on words. Several members of the family had names that meant dog. There was Mastino, which means mastiff. And there was the most famous of them all, Cangrande, which means Big Dog.

Cangrande della Scala was born in the year twelve hundred and ninety-one, and he died in the year thirteen hundred and twenty-nine. He was a soldier, a ruler, and a great patron of artists and poets. He made Verona one of the most powerful cities in northern Italy. And at his court, as we shall hear, the poet Dante found a welcome during his long exile.

The lords of the ladder soon brought the eastern shore of the lake under their rule. The lake had long been an important route for trade and for armies, and they built and rebuilt castles all around its shores. They built castles at Sirmione, at Malcesine, and at Riva. And they strengthened the harbours of Lazise and Torri.

Their castle at Sirmione is perhaps the most beautiful of all. It stands right at the entrance to the old town, surrounded by water, so that you cross a bridge to reach it. Inside, there is a protected harbour where the lords of Verona once kept their boats. Its tall keep rises forty-seven metres high. One hundred and forty-six steps lead up to the walls, and wooden stairs climb on to the top of the keep.

If you look closely at the tops of the walls of these castles, you will notice that the battlements have a particular shape. Each one is split at the top into two points, like the tail of a swallow. In medieval Italy, these swallow-tail battlements were called Ghibelline, after the emperor's party; plain, rectangular ones were called Guelph, after its rivals. Such battlements were common all over the north. But on the castles of the Della Scala, leaders of the Ghibelline cause, they seemed to announce their politics in stone, for anyone sailing past.

The family ruled Verona for one hundred and twenty-five years. But in the end, like so many medieval dynasties, they quarrelled among themselves, and their power faded. In October of the year thirteen eighty-seven, Antonio della Scala fled from Verona, and the city passed to the Visconti family of Milan.

The castles remained. Today they stand by the water in town after town, their swallow-tail battlements outlined against the sky. Seagulls rest on them. Ivy climbs their walls. And in the evening, when the lights come on in the little squares below, the old towers glow softly in the dark, like lanterns left by the lords of the ladder.

Early in the thirteen hundreds, the poet Dante Alighieri was sent into exile from his native city of Florence. It is said that he never returned. In the years that followed, he lived as a guest at the courts of others, depending on the kindness of patrons.

His first refuge, he tells us, was with a lord he called the great Lombard. This is usually thought to be Bartolomeo della Scala, the lord of Verona. Later, Dante spent time at the court of Bartolomeo's younger brother, Cangrande. Historians admit that little is known for certain about Dante's actual life in Verona. But we know that he admired Cangrande greatly, and that he dedicated the last part of his great poem, the Paradiso, to him.

In the Paradiso, Dante describes the bitterness of exile, in lines that have been quoted ever since. In the translation of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in eighteen sixty-seven, they read:

Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt the bread of others, and how hard a road the going down and up another's stairs.

But Dante also gave Lake Garda a place in his poem. In the twentieth canto of the Inferno, as Dante and his guide Virgil walk through the underworld, Virgil tells the story of how his own city, Mantua, was founded. And to explain where Mantua lies, he follows the water all the way from the mountains, through the lake, and down the river. In Longfellow's translation, it begins:

Above in beauteous Italy lies a lake at the Alp's foot that shuts in Germany over Tyrol, and has the name Benaco.

Dante still uses the old name, Benaco, from the Roman Benacus. And then he describes a place in the middle of the lake, where three bishops might all give their blessing:

Midway a place is where the Trentine Pastor, and he of Brescia, and the Veronese might give his blessing, if he passed that way.

That is, a place where the territories of three dioceses meet. Scholars have argued for centuries about exactly where this spot might be. Some say it is near Campione, on the western shore. Others suggest the little Isola del Garda. Dante does not tell us, and perhaps it does not matter.

Then he moves south, to the place where the lake flows out:

Sitteth Peschiera, fortress fair and strong, to front the Brescians and the Bergamasks, where round about the bank descendeth lowest.

And finally, the water leaves the lake and becomes a river:

Soon as the water doth begin to run, no more Benaco is it called, but Mincio, far as Governo, where it falls in Po.

It is a strange and rather wonderful thing. In the middle of a journey through the underworld, the poet pauses to describe the lake, the mountains, the fortress and the river, as calmly and clearly as a traveller's guidebook. As if, even in the darkest of places, he could not help remembering this bright water at the foot of the Alps.

On the eastern shore, beneath the long wall of Monte Baldo, lies the town of Malcesine. Its old houses crowd down a steep slope to the water. And on a rock above the lake, at the edge of the town, stands its castle.

The castle is very old. Its origins go back to the early Middle Ages, and there may have been a fortification on this rock even earlier. According to the chronicles, it was destroyed by the Franks in the year five hundred and ninety, and later rebuilt. A legend says that King Pepin, the son of Charlemagne, stayed here in the year eight hundred and six. For a time, it belonged to the bishops of Verona.

Then, from the year twelve seventy-seven, it belonged to the Della Scala, the lords of the ladder, who gave it much of the shape we see today. After them came the Visconti of Milan, and then, from the year fourteen hundred and five, the Republic of Venice, which held it for almost four hundred years. Later still, the Austrians used it as a barracks.

I climbed up to the castle on a summer morning in August. You go up through narrow lanes and steps, past little shops and doorways, until you come out into the courtyards on the rock. The castle has several levels, rising one above another, with walls and terraces and battlements, and in the middle of it all, the tall tower.

The tower is about thirty-one metres high, and it is not quite square. Its shape is an irregular five-sided figure, perhaps fitted to the rock it stands on. Inside, wooden stairs climb up and up through the dim interior, past heavy timber beams. Through the narrow slits in the thick stone walls, the old windows for archers, you catch sudden glimpses of the lake, a thin bright strip of blue, framed in darkness.

At the top is a room that was once used as a lookout. It has six windows, set into walls about eighty centimetres thick. There is a bell there, which was cast in the year fourteen forty-two. And from the windows, the view is simply breathtaking.

Below you, the roofs of Malcesine tumble down to the water, a jumble of old tiles in a hundred shades of brown and red and grey. The lake stretches away to the north and to the south, a deep, clear blue, with the mountains of the western shore rising straight out of it. Little white boats leave long trails behind them on the water. And above you, the clouds move slowly over the ridge of Monte Baldo.

Today, the castle holds a small museum about the natural history of Monte Baldo and the lake, with its rocks and plants and animals. There is a room about the old boats and fishing of the lake. And there is a room dedicated to a German visitor who came here in the year seventeen eighty-six, and whose story we will hear at the end of the night.

Down in the town, by the shore of the lake, stands another fine old building, the Palazzo dei Capitani, the Palace of the Captains. It has an elegant facade in the Venetian Gothic style, and a garden that runs right down to the water. In the year sixteen eighteen, the city of Verona bought it for four thousand ducats, as the residence of an official called the Captain of the Lake.

In the evening, when the day visitors have gone, the castle is lit up from below. And from the harbour, its tower rises golden against the darkening sky, above the masts of the boats and the quiet water.

After the lords of the ladder came the Visconti, the powerful dukes of Milan. For some fifteen years, they ruled Verona and the lake. But in September of the year fourteen hundred and two, the greatest of the Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, died at only fifty-five, and his lands fell into confusion.

Into that confusion came Venice.

The Republic of Venice had always been a city of the sea, looking out towards the east, towards its trading ports and islands across the Mediterranean. But now it began to look inland too, towards the rich cities and farmlands of the north Italian plain. After a short struggle, in June of the year fourteen hundred and five, Verona gave itself to Venice.

Envoys from Verona travelled to Venice, and in the great square of Saint Mark, they formally handed over the keys of their city. When they came home, they carried with them a banner bearing the winged lion of Saint Mark, the symbol of the Venetian Republic, a gift from the Doge.

From then on, the winged lion appeared along the eastern shore of the lake. It was set over town gates, as at Lazise, where one gate is still called the Lion Gate, and painted inside public buildings. Often the lion rests one paw on an open book, the Gospel of Saint Mark, with Latin words that mean, peace unto you, Mark, my evangelist. You can still see these lions today, if you look for them, some of them worn by the weather, but still keeping watch.

A little later, in the year fourteen twenty-six, Brescia and the western shore of the lake also came under the rule of Venice. So almost the whole lake became Venetian. Only the far north, around Riva and Torbole, remained for most of this time under other masters.

Venice was a careful ruler. It allowed the lakeside towns to keep many of their old customs and privileges. On the eastern shore, the towns were grouped together into a kind of federation, called the Gardesana dell'Acqua, the Gardesana of the water. It included ten communities, from Malcesine in the north down to Lazise in the south. They elected their own councillors, and their assemblies met at Torri, in a fine porticoed palace built in the year fourteen fifty-two, which still stands by the harbour today.

Presiding over the federation was the Captain of the Lake, who represented the authority of Verona and Venice. He lived at Malcesine, and it was his duty to defend and watch over the federation, and to keep law and order.

On the western shore, the Venetians placed their governor at Salò, which became the chief town of that side of the lake.

For most people, of course, the change of rulers made only a small difference to daily life. The fishermen still went out before dawn. The farmers still tended their vines and olive trees. The boats still carried oil and wine and grain and timber up and down the lake. Only now, the taxes went to Venice, and perhaps, on feast days, the banner of Saint Mark was raised over the little squares.

It was a long and mostly peaceful time. But before it could settle into peace, there would be one more extraordinary episode. An adventure so unlikely that it still sounds like a fairy tale. The time when Venice carried its ships over the mountains.

In the year fourteen thirty-eight, Venice was at war with the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. And the Venetian city of Brescia, not far from the western shore of Lake Garda, was under siege by the armies of Milan.

The people of Brescia were running short of food and supplies. Venice needed to reach them. But the roads were held by the enemy. The best way to bring help was across the lake, by water. There was only one problem. Venice had no fleet on Lake Garda. And the whole southern end of the lake, with its fortresses at Peschiera and Desenzano, was in the hands of Milan.

So someone proposed an extraordinary plan. If the ships could not sail to the lake, they would be carried there. Over the mountains.

The plan was approved on the first of December, fourteen thirty-eight. It is usually credited to a man named Blasio de Arboribus, together with Niccolò Sorbolo, though the old sources do not quite agree on who deserves the credit. The operation became known by a Latin name, Galeas per montes. Galleys over the mountains.

In January of the year fourteen thirty-nine, a fleet left Venice. There were six galleys, and about twenty-five other boats. They sailed along the coast, and then entered the mouth of the river Adige, and began to be rowed and towed upstream, against the current. At Verona, the river was low, and the ships had to be fitted with floats to keep them from running aground. Slowly they went on, up through the narrow gorge north of Verona, all the way to a village called Marco, near Rovereto, in the mountains.

And there, the ships left the river, and began to travel over land.

The workers laid down wooden planks and rollers. They levelled the ground, cut down trees, built small bridges, and, it is said, even pulled down some houses that were in the way. And then they harnessed oxen. Around two thousand oxen were used, and for the largest galleys, as many as one hundred and twenty pairs pulled together.

Imagine the sight. Long wooden warships, with their masts and oars, creeping slowly up a mountain valley, on rollers, pulled by hundreds of patient oxen, with men shouting and pushing and hauling on ropes, in the cold of a winter in the Alps.

On the way, the ships reached a small mountain lake called Loppio, and were floated across it. Then they were dragged on again, up to a pass called San Giovanni. And from there, the ground fell away steeply towards the northern tip of Lake Garda, and the little village of Torbole.

Going down was even more difficult than going up. The ships were tied with ropes to great rocks and lowered slowly, with winches. It is said that the sailors even spread the sails, to catch the wind blowing up the valley from the lake, so that the wind itself would act as a brake.

The overland journey covered about twenty kilometres, and it took around two weeks. It cost Venice about fifteen thousand ducats, an enormous sum.

And then, one by one, the galleys slid down into the water at Torbole, and floated on Lake Garda. After weeks of being dragged over rocks and through forests, they were ships again.

The story of the galleys does not end as neatly as one might hope. Bringing the ships over the mountains was a triumph of engineering. But winning a war on the lake was another matter.

The Duke of Milan also had boats on the lake, and his commanders were watchful. In the spring and autumn of the year fourteen thirty-nine, the Venetian fleet suffered setbacks. Once, while anchored in the gulf near Maderno, on the western shore, the Venetian ships were surprised by the Milanese galleys and badly damaged. Their commander, Pietro Zeno, drew back to the north, and sheltered his remaining ships behind a barrier of wooden stakes at Torbole.

Through the winter, it is said, the Venetians repaired and strengthened their fleet, there at the northern end of the lake.

And then, on the tenth of April, in the year fourteen forty, the fleets met again, in the northern part of the lake, between Riva and the steep cliffs of the Ponale. This time, the Venetian fleet, led by Stefano Contarini, won a decisive victory. The Milanese fleet was almost completely destroyed. The way across the lake was open, and at last, help could reach the long-suffering city of Brescia.

Many years later, the great painter Tintoretto painted the battle on the lake, and the canvas is still there, on the ceiling of the hall of the Great Council in the Doge's Palace in Venice.

But it is not really the battles that people remember. It is the image of the ships on the mountain. The galleys rising slowly up the valley on their rollers. The long lines of oxen. The ropes and the winches and the shouting men. And the wind from the lake, blowing up into the spread sails, holding the ships back as they came down towards the water.

At Malcesine, in the castle museum, there is a section about the galleys and their extraordinary journey. And at Torbole, at the northern end of the lake, people still tell the story.

When the war was over, the lake slowly returned to its quiet rhythms. Venice kept a small fleet on the water, to protect its shores. And the story of the galleys that had crossed the mountains became famous throughout Europe.

Today, at the northern end of the lake, around Torbole and Riva, the water is full of sails once more. But they are the bright sails of windsurfers and small sailing boats, racing back and forth in the strong afternoon wind. The same wind, perhaps, that once filled the sails of the galleys, as they came down the mountain to the lake.

And in the evening, when the wind drops, and the sails are folded away, the northern end of the lake grows still. The steep mountains turn purple, then grey, then black. The lights of Riva and Torbole come on one by one along the shore. And the water, which has been rough and busy all afternoon, lies calm again, reflecting the first stars.

Let us go back, for a little while, to Lazise, and to its small harbour.

Beside the harbour stands a long, tall stone building, with great arched openings along its front. It looks a little like a church, or a barn, but it is neither. It began its life as an arsenal, a shipyard and storehouse for boats, built in the time of the Della Scala. It is mentioned in documents from the year thirteen twenty-nine. Here the lords of Verona, and later the Republic of Venice, kept part of their fleet on the lake.

In the Venetian period, it is said, two war galleys were always kept ready in the harbour at Lazise, and a great chain, which could be raised and lowered, guarded the harbour entrance. During the wars of the early sixteenth century, Venice even built new galleys here.

But wars came and went, and in the year sixteen hundred and seven, on the nineteenth of October, the community of Lazise asked Venice for permission to turn the old arsenal into a customs house, a dogana. And so it became the Dogana Veneta, the Venetian customs house.

Inside, it is one single, enormous stone hall, about nine hundred square metres, and ten metres high. In the old days, boats could glide right in under the arches of the façade, unload their cargoes in the shelter of the building, and then slip out again through a side opening into the harbour.

The old documents do not give us a complete list of what those boats carried. But we can imagine the kinds of things that travelled up and down the lake, from one shore to another, and from the mountains to the plain. Olive oil and wine from the eastern hills. Grain. Timber from the forests of the north. Stone. Fish. And here, at the customs house, officials with ink and ledgers would note down each cargo, and the tolls that had to be paid.

Next to the harbour, there is a small old church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. It is a simple Romanesque building, first mentioned in documents in the year thirteen twenty. For centuries, the boatmen of Lazise would have passed it every day, on their way out onto the water and on their way home. Perhaps some of them stepped inside to say a short prayer before a long journey, or to give thanks after a stormy one.

The customs house was carefully restored in the year two thousand and three, and today it is used for exhibitions and events. Its great arches look out over the harbour as they always have.

On that February morning when I visited, the harbour was full of small boats, pulled up close together, wooden and fibreglass, blue and white and green, their covers tied down for the winter. The water inside the harbour was perfectly still, and the colourful houses along the quay were reflected in it, upside down, every window and shutter and balcony as clear as in a mirror.

A few ducks drifted slowly across the reflections. Somewhere, a radio was playing quietly in a kitchen. And the old customs house stood at the edge of it all, solid and patient, as if it were still waiting for the next boat to come in under its arches, with a cargo of oil from the hills.

A little to the north of Lazise lies Bardolino, a town known all over the world for one thing above all. Its wine.

We have already met Bardolino's two ancient churches, the little Carolingian church of San Zeno, and San Severo with its faded frescoes. But the town has other stories too.

In the time of the Della Scala, Bardolino had a duty to the lords of Verona. By the year thirteen sixty-nine, the town was required to build and maintain a warship for them, a vessel called a ganzerra, almost eighteen metres long. And later, under Venice, Bardolino remained an important place for the boats that patrolled the lake.

The old town had two gates, one called San Giovanni, and one called the Verona gate. And down by the harbour, there is an old stone table called the Preonda, which for centuries was a meeting place for the fishermen and the people of the town. Perhaps they gathered there to sort their catch, and talk, and look at the sky to judge the weather for the next day.

But it is the hills behind the town that give Bardolino its fame. They are covered with vineyards, row upon row, climbing the gentle slopes of the moraine hills left behind by the ancient glacier. The soil here is made of stones and pebbles and sand carried down by the ice, and the lake keeps the climate mild.

Vines have been grown here for a very long time. Roman wine jars, amphorae, have been found in the area, and wine from Bardolino is mentioned in documents from the early Middle Ages. The wine is made mostly from local grape varieties with lovely names. Corvina. Rondinella. Molinara. It is usually a light, fresh red wine, the colour of cherries. And there is also a pale pink version, called Chiaretto, fresh and light, which makes a lovely aperitif on an evening by the lake.

In the year nineteen sixty-eight, Bardolino wine was officially recognised with a controlled designation of origin, the DOC. But of course, wine had been made in these hills for many centuries before that.

And every year, the harvest comes. If you walk through the hills at that time of year, you will see people moving slowly along the rows with baskets and crates, cutting the heavy bunches of dark grapes. The air smells of crushed fruit and warm earth. And in the evening, the tractors come rumbling down the narrow lanes, piled high with grapes, towards the cellars.

The churches of Verona and the towns around it have a special way of ringing their bells. Since the eighteenth century, bell ringers in this region have developed a tradition of ringing the bells in a full circle, so that each bell swings right round, mouth upwards, before it sounds. It makes a clear, rich, rolling music. On a Sunday morning, or on a feast day, the sound drifts out over the rooftops and across the water.

I once looked down on Bardolino from high above, on a bright winter day. The little town lay along the curve of the shore, with its harbour full of white boats, and the lake spreading out beyond it, a shining blue. Tall dark cypresses rose here and there among the houses. And behind the town, the soft hills rolled away towards the east, with their bare winter vines, waiting patiently for spring.

Now we come to the little town of Garda itself. The town whose name, from an old Lombard word for a guard, or a watch post, was given to the whole lake.

Garda lies in a sheltered bay on the eastern shore, with the round hill of the Rocca rising just to the south, where Queen Adelaide was once held prisoner. It is a small place, with a long waterfront promenade, a little harbour, and narrow lanes of old houses running back from the lake.

Fishing has always been at the heart of life here. In the year fourteen fifty-two, the fishermen of Garda formed a corporation, called the Antichi Originari, which means something like the ancient original families. It still exists today. And every spring, it holds an auction of the rights to fish in different stretches of water, just as it has done for more than five hundred years.

On the waterfront stands the Palazzo dei Capitani, the Palace of the Captains, a pale yellow building in the Venetian Gothic style, from the fourteenth century. In the old days, it stood right at the water's edge, and boats were tied up to iron rings beneath its arcade.

At the northern end of the old town, built over one of the old town gates, is the Palazzo Fregoso, from the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century it belonged to a Genoese diplomat and general named Cesare Fregoso, who lived there with his secretary, Matteo Bandello.

But perhaps the most enchanting place near Garda is the point of San Vigilio, a little further along the shore to the north. There, among cypresses and olive trees, stands a sixteenth-century villa, built for Agostino Brenzoni, a man who longed for a place to escape the bustle of life and devote himself to his studies. It was finished around the year fifteen forty, and its design has been attributed to the architect Michele Sanmicheli.

An avenue of tall cypresses leads towards the villa. There is a tiny harbour, with a few boats, and an old inn by the water. And on an arch that greets those who arrive from the lake, there is an inscription which seems to speak directly to every tired visitor who has ever come here. It says, more or less:

Leave behind the business and the worries of the city.

It is a good thing to remember tonight.

I spent several weeks in Garda one winter, and came to know its quiet rhythms. In the mornings, the lake was often perfectly calm, pale blue and silver, with the mountains of the western shore floating faintly on the horizon. Some days there was mist, and the far shore disappeared altogether, and the lake seemed to go on forever into a soft grey nothing.

There was an old olive grove near the house, where the trunks of the trees were twisted and split and hollowed with age. And in the evening, from among the umbrella pines on the hill, I would watch the sun go down over the far side of the lake, turning the sky orange and pink and then deep blue, while the lights of the little towns came on, one by one, along the distant shore.

Wherever you go along the shores of Lake Garda, you will see olive trees. On the terraces above the towns, in the gardens of villas, in old groves among the vineyards. Their leaves are a soft grey green on top, and silver underneath, so that when the wind blows, the whole hillside seems to shimmer.

Olives are trees of the Mediterranean. They love warmth and sunshine, and they do not like hard frosts. So it is a little surprising to find them here, at the foot of the Alps, at about forty-six degrees north. The groves around Lake Garda are often described as among the northernmost olive groves in the world. It is the great mass of water in the lake, holding its warmth through the winter, that makes it possible.

The olive probably arrived here slowly, over several centuries, in Roman times. The Roman villas by the lake had presses for making oil. At the castle of Torri, on the eastern shore, stone parts of a Roman olive press are on display.

In the Middle Ages, olive trees were so valued that they were protected by law. The Lombard king Rothari, in his code of laws from the year six hundred and forty-three, set fines for anyone who damaged them. And later charters required landowners to plant new olive trees every year, two or three or four at a time. By the eighth century, olive trees around Lake Garda are mentioned in written documents. And the whole eastern shore, the Veronese shore of the lake, came to be known as the Riviera degli Olivi. The Riviera of the Olives.

When the olives are ripe, the harvest begins. In the old days, nets were spread beneath the trees, and the olives were brought down onto them, perhaps by beating the branches gently with long sticks, or by combing them off by hand, so that they fell softly onto the nets below. Then the olives were carried to the mill.

At Cisano, near Bardolino, there is a small museum of olive oil, where you can see how it was done. There is an old lever press made of oak, and a mill driven by a water wheel. The olives were crushed into a paste between heavy millstones, and the paste was pressed, slowly, until the oil ran out, golden green.

The main variety of olive around the lake, a native of these shores, is called Casaliva. The oil made here is known for being light and delicate.

Some of the olive trees by the lake are very old. Their trunks are thick and gnarled and twisted, split into several parts, sometimes hollow in the middle, so that you can look right through them. And yet, every spring, they put out new silver leaves, and tiny white flowers. And every autumn, their branches bend under the weight of the fruit.

There is something very calming about an old olive grove. The light falls softly through the leaves. The ground beneath is covered with grass and wild flowers. The trunks stand there, patient and silent, as they have stood through the lives of many generations of the people who cared for them. And beyond them, between the branches, you can see the lake, blue and still.

Halfway along the eastern shore lies the small town of Torri del Benaco. Its name means the Towers of Benaco, a reminder of the lake's old Roman name.

In the year nine hundred and five, King Berengar the First stayed here. According to the town's history, he built walls around it, and a tower that still carries his name, and he signed several royal documents while he was staying by the lake.

Later, the Della Scala built a castle at Torri. The castle we see today was rebuilt in the year thirteen eighty-three, by Antonio della Scala, the last of the lords of the ladder, just a few years before he lost Verona. It has three tall towers, and battlements, and it stands right beside the little harbour. After the Della Scala, it passed to the Visconti, and then, in the year fourteen hundred and five, to Venice.

And it was here at Torri, as we have heard, that the federation of the lakeside towns held its meetings, in a porticoed palace built in the year fourteen fifty-two.

Torri's castle has one unusual feature. In the year seventeen sixty, part of its outer wall was taken down to make room for a lemon house. A limonaia. These were tall structures of stone pillars and wooden beams, built on terraces against a sunny wall. They had glass windows and movable roofs, so that in winter, when the frosts came, the trees could be sheltered from the cold. The lemon house at Torri is one of the few still in use, and in it, lemon trees still grow and bear fruit, at the foot of the Alps.

But Torri holds something much older than its castle. On the hills above the town, on smooth, sloping rocks polished long ago by the glacier, there are thousands of ancient carvings.

They were first studied in the nineteen sixties. Since then, at least three thousand figures have been found, on about two hundred and fifty rocks. They were scratched and pecked into the stone over a very long period of time, from prehistory into much later centuries. There are human figures, and animals, and weapons, and strange symbols. On one rock, there are twelve horsemen riding together. And there are boats. Many boats. Some are simple dugout canoes, like the one found at Lucone. And others, carved much later, look like the galleys of Venice, with their oars and their sails.

It is a moving thought. That over thousands of years, people kept climbing these hills, sitting on these warm, smooth rocks above the lake, and carving into them the things they saw and cared about. Their animals. Their journeys. And above all, their boats on the water below.

If you walk up there on a quiet afternoon, among the oaks and the olive trees, you can sit on one of those rocks yourself. The stone is warm from the sun. Lizards dart across it. And far below, the lake shines between the trees, with a single small boat moving slowly across it, leaving a thin white line behind.

On the morning of the twelfth of September, in the year seventeen eighty-six, a German traveller set out from the town of Rovereto, in the mountains north of the lake. He had just turned thirty-seven. At home, in the little duchy of Weimar, he was a Privy Councillor at the court of the duke, and he was famous all over Europe as the author of a novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. A few days before, he had slipped away, as he put it himself, from his duties and from all that fame, and set off for Italy. His name was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The evening before, at Rovereto, he had written that this was where the language changed, from German to Italian. And he was delighted, for Italian was the language he had always loved most. Now, at last, it was alive all around him.

He might have gone straight down the valley of the Adige to Verona. But he wanted to see Lake Garda. So he took a side road, up over a high rocky ridge, and down the other side to the little village of Torbole, at the northern end of the lake. He kept a journal of his travels, in the form of letters to his friends, and many years later he published it as his Italian Journey.

That afternoon, at Torbole, he wrote, in an English translation from eighteen forty-nine:

How much do I wish that my friends were with me for a moment to enjoy the prospect, which now lies before my eyes.

And then:

I might have been in Verona this evening but a magnificent natural phenomenon was in my vicinity, Lake Garda, a splendid spectacle, which I did not want to miss, and now I am nobly rewarded for taking this circuitous route.

On the way up, he wrote, he had been accompanied by fig trees, and as he came down into the warm, rocky air near the lake, he found the first olive tree full of fruit. He put his table in the doorway of his room, overlooking the courtyard, and made a rough sketch of the view, with almost the whole length of the lake stretching away to the south.

He noticed the wind. He learned that it blew down the lake from the north in the night, and turned in the day to blow from the south. And then he read that the lake had once been called Benacus, and that Virgil had written of it, rising with waves and a roar like the sea. Goethe wrote:

This is the first Latin verse, the subject of which ever stood visibly before me, and now, in the present moment, when the wind is blowing stronger and stronger, and the lake casts loftier billows against the little harbour, it is just as true as it was hundreds of years ago.

And then, a beautiful thought:

Much, indeed, has changed, but the wind still roars about the lake, the aspect of which gains even greater glory from a line of Virgil's.

In the cool of the evening, he went for a walk, and found himself, he said, in a new country. The doors had no locks, and the innkeeper assured him he could be quite at ease even if he were carrying diamonds. The windows had oiled paper instead of glass. The neighbours chattered and called to one another all day long. I have not yet seen an idle woman, he wrote.

For dinner, the innkeeper proudly served him the finest trout, caught near Torbole, where the river comes down from the mountains. The fishery, Goethe was told, was rented out by the emperor for ten thousand gulden. And afterwards, there was fruit. Figs, and pears. He was delighted. Here, at last, was the south.

At three o'clock the next morning, Goethe set off down the lake in a boat, with two rowers. At first the wind was with them, and they put up a sail. As the sky grew light, they passed Limone, on the western shore, and Goethe admired its lemon gardens, laid out in terraces up the mountainside, with rows of square white pillars supporting the beams that would shelter the trees in winter.

But then the wind changed, as it does every day on this lake. It turned and blew from the south, straight against them, and the rowers could make no headway. So they had to put in at the harbour of Malcesine, which they had only just passed. Goethe took it calmly. When one has to do with water, he wrote, we cannot say, I will be at this or that particular place to-day.

He decided to make the best of it, by drawing the castle.

Early the next morning, he walked up to the old castle, which at that time had neither gate nor guard. He found a stone seat in the courtyard, opposite the old tower, sat down, and began to sketch.

Soon, a few people wandered into the courtyard, and looked at him. Then a few more. Before long, a small crowd had gathered, and stood all around him, watching. Then a man came up and asked him what he was doing. Goethe said he was drawing the old tower, as a remembrance of Malcesine. The man told him this was not allowed, and, with true Italian coolness, as Goethe put it, he tore the drawing.

The crowd murmured. An old woman said that this was not right, and that the podestà, the local magistrate, should be called. So the podestà came, with his clerk.

Why, they asked, was this foreigner drawing their fortifications? Goethe explained, very patiently, that he did not think of it as a fortification at all, but only as a ruin. To which came the reply: If it was only a ruin, what could there be remarkable about it?

So Goethe began to speak of the beauty of old ruins, of the many travellers who came to Italy just to see them. The morning sun was shining on the tower and the rocks and the walls, and he described the scene with enthusiasm. And the whole crowd, who had their backs to the castle, all turned their heads at once to look at what he was praising, like a flock of curious birds. Goethe found this so funny that his good humour only grew.

But the clerk was suspicious. The castle, he said, marked the border between Venice and the Austrian empire. Perhaps this foreigner was a spy, sent by the emperor.

No, said Goethe. He was not a subject of the emperor at all. He was a citizen of a free city. He came from Frankfurt.

At that, a young woman in the crowd cried out. From Frankfurt! Then let Gregorio be called, she said. He lived there for a long time, and he will know.

Gregorio came. He was a man in his fifties, who had long lived in Frankfurt, in service with one of the Italian families there. And he and Goethe began to talk, about the families he had known, the city, the people, the weddings and the children, while the crowd listened, and Gregorio translated parts of the conversation into the local dialect. Gregorio was pleased, and touched.

At last he turned to the podestà, and told him that this was a good and well-educated gentleman, travelling to learn, and that he should be allowed to go in peace, so that he would speak well of Malcesine to his countrymen.

And so it ended. Goethe was free to wander as he pleased, in Gregorio's company. When he tried to thank him, the old man said simply: Do not thank me, for you owe me nothing.

That evening, Gregorio took Goethe to his vineyard, which lay in a fine spot, down along the lake. His son, a boy of fifteen, climbed the trees to pick the best fruit, while the old man searched among the vines for the ripest grapes. And Goethe, standing between these two kind people, in that quiet place, thought about the strange adventure of the day.

Then, towards midnight, the innkeeper walked with him down to the boat, carrying a basket of fruit that Gregorio had given him as a present. And with a favourable wind, Goethe sailed away from Malcesine, south, down the dark lake.

He travelled through the night. As the morning came, he watched the western shore slide past, with its villages standing in a row along the water, Gargnano, Toscolano, Maderno, Salò. No words, he wrote, can express the beauty of this richly inhabited spot.

At ten o'clock in the morning, he landed at Bardolino. He put his luggage on one mule, and himself on another, and rode up over the stony ridge of the old moraine, and down into the wide plain. And by the afternoon, he had reached Verona, where he hoped to see the great Roman amphitheatre that very evening. His Italian journey had only just begun. It would last until the year seventeen eighty-eight.

And the lake went on, as it always had.

It is evening now, on Lake Garda. The wind from the south has dropped. The water is very still, and it holds the last light of the sky, pale gold and rose and lavender. In the little harbours, the boats rock gently on their ropes. A fisherman coils a net on the quay. And somewhere, across the water, a church bell rings, slowly, and stops.

The lecturer John Stoddard wrote, more than a hundred years ago, of the charm this lake takes on when one or two fishing boats appear, gliding mysteriously round a distant headland, and looking, with their red, blue, brown, or orange sails, like monster butterflies, skimming with gorgeous wings the mirror of the lake.

Deep down beneath the surface, in the cold, dark water, a hundred or two hundred metres below, swims a fish that lives nowhere else in the world. The carpione, the trout of Lake Garda. People have prized it since the days of the ancient Romans. And it is there now, moving slowly through the darkness, while the lights come on along the shore.

On the hills, the olive trees stand silver in the dusk. In the old towns, the castle towers glow golden above the rooftops. The swallow-tail battlements are outlined against the first stars. And the long ridge of Monte Baldo fades from purple into shadow.

We have travelled a long way tonight. From the ice, and the ancient sea, and the villages on stilts. Through the Roman poet coming home to Sirmione, and the queen in her tower, and the lords of the ladder. Past the galleys on the mountain, and the lion of Saint Mark, and the old customs house. To a German traveller, drawing a castle, and making friends with a stranger who remembered Frankfurt.

All of them came and went. And the lake is still here. Rising and falling with the wind. Holding the light. Keeping its own slow time.

Remember the words on the arch at San Vigilio. Leave behind the business and the worries of the city. And of the day, too. There is nothing more you need to do tonight. Let the water carry you.

Thank you for spending this evening by the lake with me. Sleep well. And goodnight from Lake Garda.