Life on Lake Garda, 1800–1918: Lemon Houses and Steamboats

Hello, and welcome back to the lake. Tonight, we are going to spend another long, quiet evening on Lake Garda, in the north of Italy. But this time, we will not be travelling through the ancient centuries, with their kings and castles and fleets of war. Tonight, our story is smaller, and closer, and more ordinary. It is the story of how people lived beside this lake, in the hundred years or so between the time of Napoleon and the end of the First World War. From about eighteen hundred, to nineteen eighteen.

There is nothing you need to remember, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story come and go, like the sound of water against the side of a small boat. If you drift off before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this evening is for.

In those years, the lake was a working place. On the steep western shore, there were gardens of lemon trees, sheltered behind rows of tall white pillars, and closed up with planks of wood every winter. On the hills, there were olive groves, silver and grey. On the water, there were fishermen, out at night with their long nets and their little lanterns. There were square sails and wooden barges, and after a while, there were small steamboats too, with great paddle wheels turning at their sides.

For much of this time, a border ran across the lake. On one side was the Kingdom of Italy. On the other, the Empire of Austria. Customs officers watched the water at night with searchlights, looking for smugglers. And at the northern end, in the little town of Riva, travellers from Vienna and Munich and Prague came to sit in the sun, and drink coffee under the palm trees, and take the lake air for their health.

Many of the pictures you will see tonight are very old. Some are coloured photographs, made around the year eighteen ninety, using a process called photochrom, which turned black and white negatives into soft, painted colour. Others are old picture postcards, sent home by visitors more than a century ago. Some are views from above, flying slowly over the water. And some are photographs I took myself, on my own visits to the lake, in winter and in summer.

We will meet a few people along the way. A guidebook writer from Milan, walking among the lemon trees in the eighteen forties. A German writer, watching a steamboat leave Riva in a cloud of pine smoke. An English novelist, living for one winter in a rented house in Gargnano, listening to the hammering of the lemon gardens being closed for the cold. And many others, whose names are not remembered at all. The gardeners. The fishermen. The boatmen. The old woman spinning wool on the church terrace.

So, make yourself comfortable. Let your shoulders soften. Let your breathing slow down. And let's begin, around the year eighteen hundred, on a lake that was about to be pulled in several directions at once.

For several hundred years before eighteen hundred, most of Lake Garda had belonged to the Republic of Venice. But it was not ruled as one single place. Each shore had its own customs and its own councils.

The western shore, on the side of Brescia, was a kind of small confederation of villages, thirty-four communities in all. It was known, rather grandly, as the Magnificent Homeland of the Riviera of Salò. Its council met in the town of Salò, beside the water.

The eastern shore, on the side of Verona, had its own organisation under Venetian rule. It was called the Gardesana of the Water. It had a captain of the lake, who lived at Malcesine, and a general council that met at Torri. One old guidebook adds that the right to fish, everywhere on the lake, belonged to the people of the Veronese shore.

And the narrow northern tip, with the town of Riva, was not Venetian at all. For a long time, it belonged to the Prince-Bishop of Trento, in the mountains to the north.

Then, in the summer of seventeen ninety-six, the armies came. The young general Napoleon Bonaparte had marched into Italy, and the Austrian armies came down from the Alps to stop him. One Austrian column came down the western side of the lake. At Salò, a French general named Guyeux, cut off with a few hundred men, shut himself inside a large palace beside the water, and held it for three days, until help came. Fifty years later, the walls of that palace still showed the marks of the attack.

In early August, Napoleon fought the Austrians at Lonato, just south of the lake, and then at Castiglione. And in January of the next year, he won another great battle at Rivoli, just to the east.

The old order did not survive. In seventeen ninety-seven, the Republic of Venice came to an end, after more than a thousand years. That autumn, a treaty drew a new border, running down from the Tyrol, along a mountain stream, and straight across the lake to Lazise. For a short while, the western shore belonged to a new French-inspired republic in the north of Italy, and the eastern shore belonged to Austria.

For less than a year, the new republic even created a department named after the lake itself, the Department of Benaco, using the old Roman name for Garda. Its capital was Desenzano. And its districts were given poetic names. One was called the District of the Oranges, and its chief town was Gargnano.

The borders shifted again and again over the next few years. For a time, the northern tip of the lake even belonged to the Kingdom of Bavaria. Then, from eighteen ten, the whole region became part of Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and Riva was a district in a new department of the Upper Adige.

When Napoleon fell, everything changed once more. In the spring of eighteen fifteen, Austria announced a new kingdom, called Lombardy-Venetia. It covered the south, the east and the west of the lake. And the northern tip, with Riva, was joined to the Austrian county of Tyrol. So once again, the whole lake belonged to a single power. This time, it was the Austrian Empire.

A guidebook from Verona, written in eighteen forty-two, describes Riva in those quieter years. It was a small, strong town of the Tyrol, with the finest and largest harbour on the lake. Grain passed through it, on its way between Germany and Italy. And three times a year, it held a fair that lasted for three days. Just along the shore, at Torbole, boats unloaded fruit and goods from the opposite shore, and carters took them over the hills to Rovereto, and on into the German lands.

For a while, the lake was peaceful. And on its sunny western shore, one particular kind of garden was growing.

If you had sailed along the western shore of Lake Garda in the eighteen forties, from Salò up towards Gargnano and Limone, you would have seen something very strange on the hillsides. Rows and rows of tall, square pillars, standing in long lines on stepped terraces above the water. In summer, between the pillars, there were dark green leaves, and bright yellow fruit.

These were the lemon gardens. In Italian they are usually called limonaie. But the people of the lake had their own words for them. A guidebook from eighteen forty-six, written by a man named Ercoliani, explains that the whole place where lemons, citrons and oranges were grown was simply called a garden. Each garden rose up the slope in steps. Each step was a strip of ground held up by a low stone wall. And the pillars divided each strip into little rooms, about seven or eight arm's lengths wide. Each of these little rooms was called a field. A campo.

In the dialect of the lake, the terraces were called còle. Little sheds for storing wood were called caselli. And there were channels to bring water, and stone tanks, and steps, and brackets of stone sticking out from the walls.

At the top of the pillars were beams of chestnut wood. In summer, the gardens stood open to the sky. But in winter, as we will see, all of this would be closed in, with boards and windows, to keep out the frost.

Why were there lemon trees here at all, so far north, at the foot of the Alps? The answer is the lake itself. The great body of water stores the warmth of summer, and the high mountains shelter the western shore from the cold northern winds. On these steep, sunny slopes facing east and south, the air is surprisingly mild. Today, the lemon gardens of Garda are often described as the most northerly place in the world where citrus fruit was ever grown for trade.

No one knows exactly when the first lemon trees came. There is an old tradition, told in Gargnano, that the Franciscan friars of the convent there brought them, in the thirteenth century. People point to the stone capitals in the friars' cloister, which are carved with leaves and citrus fruit. But no document proves it, and the careful sources call it a tradition, and nothing more.

We do know that, by the late fourteen hundreds, a Venetian traveller found gardens of citrons and oranges at Maderno, as he put it, in infinite numbers. And a description from the year fifteen fifty-two, of a small garden at Tignale, already mentions a cave where the boards were stored, to cover the trees when the cold weather came. The great walled lemon houses, with their rows of pillars, were built mostly from the sixteen hundreds onwards.

In the year sixteen forty-six, a Jesuit scholar in Rome named Giovanni Battista Ferrari published a magnificent book about citrus fruit, called the Hesperides. It was named after the nymphs of Greek legend who guarded a garden of golden apples. One of its engravings shows the Hesperides themselves, offering the first lemons to the god of Lake Garda, who rises out of the water to receive them. The drawing was designed by the painter Nicolas Poussin, and engraved by Cornelis Bloemaert.

By the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the lemon gardens on the western shore covered about forty-seven hectares. Gargnano alone had twenty-four of them. Limone had seven, Maderno six, and Toscolano three and a half. Ercoliani wrote that, between Salò and Gargnano, the gardens followed one another almost without a break.

The English novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived here for a winter many years later, described them beautifully. All summer long, he wrote, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stand the rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of temples.

In the warm months, the lemon trees stood open to the sun and the rain. But a hard frost could kill them. So every autumn, the whole garden had to be closed in, like a house.

The covering season ran from November to March. There was an old saying on the lake, that the lemon house must be shut tight by the feast of Saint Catherine, on the twenty-fifth of November.

The work was done in a particular order. First came the boards for the roof, laid across beams of larch and chestnut, resting on top of the pillars. Then the middle boards. And last of all, the front of the house, facing the sun, was closed with wooden panels and doors and windows of glass. Any gaps between the boards were stuffed with dry grass.

It was heavy work. Hundreds of people spent days at it, with ladders and nails and hammers, fitting the pieces back together like a giant puzzle.

D. H. Lawrence watched it happen at Gargnano, in November of nineteen twelve. When cold winds came down, he wrote, and snow had fallen on the mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and we heard the clang of falling planks.

He watched two men walking along the tops of the pillars, in their heavy wooden clogs, laying long thin poles from one pillar to the next. There was a drop of twenty or thirty feet beneath them. But they went easily, he said, from pillar-summit to pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. They talked and sang as they worked. And all day long, the sound of the hammering echoed across the water, so that even the men in the boats far out on the lake could hear it.

When it was finished, the front of the lemon house was a long wall of old, dark wood, in roughly made panels, with here and there a panel of glass, pane overlapping pane.

On sunny winter mornings, a few of the panels would be opened again, to let in the light and the air. Lawrence would lie in bed and hear a little sliding noise, which told him that the gardeners were opening the lemon houses, one long panel here, and another there.

Inside, it was dim and cool, like a great dark barn. The tall lemon trees stood in the shadows, heavy with fruit you could only half see. Little orange trees grew beside the path. And the air was full of a faint, exquisite scent of lemon flowers.

On the coldest nights, the gardeners lit fires. In the dialect, this was called fogar. They burned brushwood and branches and pieces of wood along the terraces, to keep the frost away. In the winter of eighteen twenty-three, a gardener at Tignale named Andrea Parisini lit fires inside his lemon house, as was the custom. And when Lawrence walked through a lemon house at Gargnano, he noticed round little patches of ash on the ground, and stumps of charred wood, where fires had been kindled on cold nights.

Then, in March, with the first warmth of spring, the whole house was taken apart again. The boards and panels and windows were carried back into the sheds, and the trees stood once more in the open air.

The lemon trees were remarkably generous. The fruit did not ripen all at once, but in several harvests through the year. At one garden in Tignale, the harvests were recorded in a register. In the year nineteen-oh-seven, there were four of them, beginning in April, June, July and August. Together they produced almost sixty-nine thousand lemons.

A single large tree could bear an astonishing crop. Ercoliani wrote that many trees gave two or three thousand lemons a year, and that a few famous giants were shown to visitors because they bore as many as eight thousand.

The local lemon was a variety called the Madernina, a name that recalls the village of Maderno. It grew on a single trunk, four or five metres tall, and its fruit was round and juicy, with a thin peel and a strong scent. Lawrence learned from his landlord that the lemon trees were grafted onto the roots of bitter orange trees, which were stronger, and resisted disease.

He wrote one more lovely sentence about the dim inside of a lemon house. Looking down the dark length of the house, the many ruddy oranges beside the path reminded him of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale lemons above were the stars.

So many lemons could not all be eaten on the lake. Most of them travelled.

Local histories say that the lemons of Garda were sent north in great numbers, over the Alps, to Austria and Germany, and further still, to Poland and Russia. They were valued not only for eating, but as a medicine, and for their juice, which was rich in citric acid.

An English handbook for travellers, published by John Murray in eighteen fifty-two, reports that the province of Brescia produced eleven million eight hundred thousand lemons every year. Almost all of them came from the district of Gargnano. A few yards of ground set aside for lemons, it said, was enough to support a whole family. The peasants here, it added, were really gardeners.

In about eighteen forty, the growers of the western shore joined together to sell their fruit. Their company was called the Society of Lake Garda, and it was based in the old Franciscan convent at Gargnano. Down by the water, it built a large sorting room, square in shape, with a roof held up by elegant cast iron columns, and arches of glass looking out onto the lake. Here, the lemons were checked and sorted and packed before they were sent away.

The Society handled enormous quantities. Between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty, it sold about one hundred and twenty-five million lemons. In its best year, eighteen fifty-two, it sold almost ten million. In an ordinary year, it was six or seven million, most of them from Gargnano.

In eighteen forty-six, Ercoliani wrote that the lemons of the Riviera usually sold for one soldo each, a small copper coin. He believed they were better than any other lemons in Italy, and that they fetched a better price. The lemons of Limone, he said, were the juiciest and most prized of the whole shore.

Later visitors agreed. An English writer, Helena Waters, said that the lemons of Limone had a sharper flavour than those of Sicily, and that they travelled better, too.

How did the fruit leave the lake? Mostly by water. Limone, for example, sat at the foot of enormous cliffs, and until the coast road was built, around nineteen thirty, it could only be reached by boat, or by steep mule tracks over the mountains. People in Limone still remember hearing how heavy crates of lemons were carried down the narrow lanes to the little harbour, and loaded onto boats. The afternoon wind from the south, the Ora, helped carry the boats up the lake.

At the northern end, boats unloaded at Torbole, and the cargo went on by cart over the hills to Rovereto, and then north over the Alps.

The lemon coast produced other things too. Laurel trees were planted along the roads and between the gardens, and their berries were pressed for laurel oil. In earlier times, this oil was shipped as far as Holland and Constantinople. By eighteen forty-six that trade had faded, but the laurels still stood as hedges along the paths. And in eighteen seventy-nine, the Society of Lake Garda built a small factory at Gargnano to make laurel oil once more.

In Salò, there was a drink made from citrons. In the seventeen hundreds, so the story goes, a chemist of the town mixed citron with white wine, and made his fortune. It became known as acqua di cedro, citron water, and it was still one of the town's main industries in the nineteen twenties.

So in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the lemon gardens were at their height. Millions of lemons every year. Boats loaded at every little harbour. And no one could have guessed how quickly it would change.

In the year eighteen fifty-five, a sickness appeared among the lemon trees at Limone.

At first, a sticky, foul-smelling gum began to ooze from the base of the trunks. Then the roots began to rot. The old and weak trees died first. And the disease spread south along the shore, to Gargnano, to Bogliaco, to Toscolano and Maderno. It was worst of all near the water's edge, where the air was mildest and the trees had been most carefully tended. The growers called it the gum disease.

A local landowner, Count Bettoni, kept careful notes. He saw that the lemon trees were struck first, and the orange trees less badly. The wild bitter oranges hardly suffered at all. Hot, dry summers seemed to help. Wet summers made it worse.

For almost twenty years, the disease went on, and it was not checked until after eighteen seventy-three. The growers had noticed something important. Among the sick trees, the bitter orange trees stayed healthy. So they grafted their lemon trees onto bitter orange roots, and slowly, the gardens recovered.

But the world beyond the lake had changed. In eighteen sixty-one, Italy became a single kingdom. Railways began to run from the south to the north. And lemons from Sicily and southern Italy, which were cheaper and easier to grow in the open air, could now reach the markets of the north quickly and cheaply. The lemon gardens of Garda, with their pillars and planks and winter fires, were very expensive to keep. Later, chemists learned to make citric acid in the laboratory, and the lemon lost another of its old uses.

By nineteen thirteen, the Baedeker guidebook noted that, because of the disease known as gumming, and of low prices, the yield of lemons was steadily decreasing.

D. H. Lawrence saw it happening around him in Gargnano. His landlord owned lemon gardens, and Lawrence watched him one day, looking at his trees. Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed, Lawrence wrote. I think he hates them. They are leaving him in the lurch. Many of the gardens, he noticed, were already in ruins, and many more had signs on them saying they were for sale.

Then came the First World War. The army needed wood, and the boards and beams that covered the lemon gardens were taken away for military use. In some villages, that was the end. A few gardens kept going for a while longer. But a very cold winter in nineteen twenty-nine killed many of the trees that remained.

And yet, if you walk along the western shore today, you can still see the white pillars, standing in rows on the terraces, among the olive trees. And a few of the old lemon gardens have been brought back to life.

In Limone, there is the Limonaia del Castèl. It was built in the early seventeen hundreds, and a date carved on its well reads the fifteenth of April, seventeen eighty-six. In nineteen twenty-six it was bought by a man named Giuseppe Segala, who had come home after years working as a miner in America. Today it belongs to the town, and about a hundred citrus trees grow there again.

On the shore below Tignale, in a small bay between the cliffs, there is the garden called Pra de la Fam, the meadow of hunger. It was bought by a family named Parisini in seventeen fifty-four, and it was restored in the nineteen eighties. And at Gargnano, a garden called La Malora still produces about twenty thousand lemons a year, of the old Madernina variety.

In winter, some of them are still covered with boards and glass, just as they were two hundred years ago.

If the western shore was the shore of lemons, the eastern shore was the shore of olives. People on the lake still call the stretch around Garda and Bardolino the Riviera degli Olivi, the Riviera of the Olives. And the shore opposite, from Salò to Limone, was the Riviera of the Lemons.

In fact, olive trees grew almost everywhere around the lake. The Baedeker guide of nineteen thirteen says that olive groves covered both banks, and climbed the slopes up to about three hundred metres, and grew far up the valley of the Sarca, north of the lake. An Italian traveller named Pollini, who sailed around the lake in eighteen sixteen, found the hills around San Vigilio completely covered with sturdy olive trees, and the hills of Gargnano covered with olives and fruit trees.

Ercoliani, in eighteen forty-six, described a road near Salò that was lined on one side with laurels, and on the other with a double row of olives and mulberry trees. Between the lemon gardens, the land was planted with vines and olives together.

The olive tree is very old on this lake. A law of the Lombard king Rothari, in the year six hundred and forty-three, already set heavy fines for anyone who damaged an olive tree. And in the Middle Ages, village rules required landowners to plant several new olive trees every year.

The trees were not without their troubles. The Baedeker guide mentions that they suffered a good deal from a fungus, which it called scale, so that the growers had to hollow out the trunks. An English writer, Laura Ragg, wrote in the nineteen twenties that the olive oil of Garda was of excellent quality, and that in some places the trees grew to an unusual size.

The harvest came in late autumn and winter, from November to January. The small museum in the town of Garda describes how it was done in the early nineteen hundreds. The pickers climbed long ladders, called scarione. They picked the olives by hand, into a bag which they called el gremal. The trees were pruned every second year.

Then the olives were taken to the mill. There was one mill at Garda, two at Bardolino, and four at Torri. The olives were crushed under great stones, and pressed, and on average, a hundred kilos of olives gave about seventeen litres of oil. The main variety was the Casaliva, a local olive, which is still grown today.

At Cisano, near Bardolino, there is a small museum of olive oil, where you can still see a great wooden lever press made of oak, and a mill driven by water, the way it was in the eighteen hundreds.

The winters here are mild, but not always. In the year seventeen oh nine, the whole lake froze over, the only time in recorded history. And in January of nineteen thirteen, D. H. Lawrence climbed the hills above Gargnano, and found himself in a lane full of snow, looking out over olive orchards standing on lawns of snow.

But usually, the winter light here is soft and clear. And the olive trees stand quietly on the hills, their grey-green leaves turning silver whenever the wind moves them.

All around the lake, in every little harbour, there were fishermen.

An Italian scholar named Giuseppe Solitro, writing in nineteen-oh-four, counted twenty-two kinds of fish in Lake Garda. Thirteen of them mattered to the fishermen. There were trout and pike, tench and eels, carp and barbel, and many smaller fish. But two were special.

The first was the carpione. It is a kind of trout that lives only in Lake Garda, and nowhere else in the world. It swims in the deepest parts of the lake, in the cold, dark water. Ercoliani wrote that it lived only between Gargnano and Campione on the western side, and around Torri on the eastern side, where the lake is deepest. It was small, usually about half a kilo, with golden scales along its back.

Because of that golden colour, there was an old legend that the carpione fed on gold dust. Another story, told by a poet of the Renaissance, said that the carpioni had once been boatmen, who tried to rob the god Saturn, and were turned into fish with golden backs as a punishment.

The carpione was a fish for princes. When important guests came to the lake, the local magistrates would invite them to watch the carpione being caught. The Emperor Joseph the Second of Austria watched it, in the year seventeen sixty-five. And the Republic of Venice sometimes forbade the fishermen to sell it outside the lake, so that there would always be carpione for the banquets of the state.

The second special fish was the shad, a kind of freshwater sardine. The fishermen had three names for it, depending on its age. When it was young, it was called scarabina. In the middle of its life, sardena. And when it was fully grown, agone. In early summer, the shad swam in great shoals just below the surface.

To catch them, the fishermen used an enormous net called the remàt. The museum at Garda calls it the king of nets. It was shaped like a great bowl, and it could be up to four hundred metres long. A single haul could bring in thirty quintals of fish, three thousand kilos. Laura Ragg watched the sardine fishing on May and June nights, and she wrote of the strong, sweating figures of the men, hauling in the heavy net, which seemed, in the moonlight, to be filled with gleaming quicksilver.

The nets were made of linen and hemp, and later of cotton. The fishermen made them at home, knotting them by hand on long winter evenings. Floats were made of cork, and the weights were little bags of gravel.

From about eighteen fifty, the fishermen of Garda began to use a long trolling line, called the tirlindana, to catch trout in deep water. It was wound on a wooden reel, and the fishermen often hung little holy medals on the reel, for luck. A small bell on the end of a cane told them when a fish had taken the bait. The lake trout could grow very large. One caught off Torri, on the twentieth of July, eighteen ninety-seven, weighed almost fifteen kilos.

There were eel fishermen too, who set lines of hemp, sometimes several kilometres long, with baited hooks. Others fished at night with little oil lanterns on floating rafts, which marked where their nets lay in the dark water.

At the town of Garda, the fishermen belonged to a very old association, called the Antichi Originari, the Ancient Originals. In the year fourteen fifty-two, the fishermen of Garda, Torri and Sirmione joined together to buy the fishing rights around San Vigilio, for a thousand gold ducats. Every spring, the fishing places were shared out among the families by drawing lots. And at the end of the summer, the profits were divided.

It is said that once, in seventeen ninety-four, when the community was deep in debt, the women of the fishing families pawned their gold and their wedding rings to help pay it off.

In the middle of the lake, between San Vigilio and Sirmione, there was once a tall wooden pole standing out of the water. It marked a shallow bank where the fish gathered. On top of it there was an iron lantern, and a little flag to show the wind, and two small pictures of the Madonna, watching over the boats.

Much of the fishing was done at night. And so, as Helena Waters noticed, by day the fishermen could often be seen sound asleep on the shore, in the shade of the olive trees.

Before the steamboats came, everything on the lake moved by oar, or by sail.

When Pollini travelled around Garda, for his book of eighteen sixteen, he found that the boats all carried a broad square sail, and a rudder. The largest cargo boats were few, and could carry about six tonnes. The fishing boats were smaller, and could take ten passengers, with two or three boatmen. With a good wind, the big boats could make ten miles an hour. And Pollini noticed one important thing. The boats on Garda never tried to sail against the wind.

The typical fishing boat of the lake was long and narrow, with a flat bottom covered in pitch. It was about seven or eight metres long. It was called a gondola, or sometimes a bissa, which means a snake. The men rowed standing up, facing forward, in the Venetian way. Every year, the boats were pulled up onto the beach, and their seams were sealed again with pitch and tar.

In the early eighteen hundreds, a new kind of sail appeared on the lake, a sail shaped like a trapezium, with four uneven sides. It came to be known as the Garda sail. An American visitor in nineteen fourteen, Elizabeth Haight, watched a boat off Sirmione with orange-coloured sails, pointed like swallows' wings, skimming across the bay.

The boats carried all kinds of cargo. Riva traded in timber and planks, in coal, and in grain passing between Germany and Italy. Boats loaded with the produce of the opposite shore landed at Torbole, and from there the goods went on over land, towards Germany. And later, big sailing barges carried white stone from the quarries near Garda across to the other shore.

But the boatmen depended completely on the winds. And Lake Garda has some of the most famous winds of any lake in Europe.

The most important were two winds that came almost every day, one after the other, as regular as a clock.

The first came from the north. People called it the Pelèr, or the Sover, which simply means the wind from above. It began late at night, around midnight, blowing down from the mountains of the Tyrol, along the whole length of the lake. It grew stronger at sunrise, and lasted until about midday. So in the early morning, a boat could sail easily from north to south.

Then, around noon, the north wind died away, and a new wind rose from the south. This was the Ora. It blew up the lake through the afternoon, until sunset, and it was strongest at the northern end, where the lake narrows between the mountains like a funnel. So in the afternoon, the boats could sail back home again, from south to north.

Pollini wrote that both of these winds were extremely helpful to navigation. A boatman who understood them could go up and down the lake almost every day.

There were other winds too, with other names. The Vinessa came from the south-east, cool and damp, and the farmers feared it, because it could damage the blossom on the trees. The Balì was the most violent of all, a cold, wild wind that could blow for three days at a time. And in the evening, at the northern end, a breeze came down from the Ledro valley, called the Ponale.

Laura Ragg wrote of a stormy north wind she called the Suer, which tears down, she said, from the clefts of Monte Baldo and the cold heights of the Tyrol. In a storm from the north, the Baedeker guide warned, the whole lake could become almost as rough as the sea.

Sometimes the winds simply refused to cooperate. There is a story about the little lemon garden at Tignale called Pra de la Fam, the meadow of hunger. Boatmen on their way to the Saturday market at Riva would sometimes be stuck there for a day or two, waiting for the wind to change, with nothing to eat. Or so one old explanation of the name goes.

On the western shore, near Toscolano, a small river comes rushing down from the mountains, through a deep and narrow gorge. For more than five hundred years, this river turned the wheels of paper mills.

The first paper mill on the Toscolano river is recorded in a document dated the seventeenth of October, thirteen eighty-one. In the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, this little valley became one of the most important places for making paper in the whole Republic of Venice. Its paper was sold far and wide, to the Levant, to Germany, and all over Europe.

In those days, paper was made from rags. Old cloth of linen and hemp and cotton was collected, sorted, and cut into pieces. The pieces were soaked in great stone tanks, with water and lime. Then heavy wooden hammers, driven by water wheels, pounded the wet rags for hours, until they turned into a soft pulp. The master paper-maker dipped a fine mesh frame into the pulp, and lifted out a single sheet. The sheets were pressed, and hung up to dry.

There was printing here too. A small schoolbook was printed at Toscolano in fourteen eighty-eight. And a few decades later, a printer named Paganino de Paganini moved his press from Salò to Toscolano.

But the valley had hard times. In sixteen thirty, a terrible plague swept through northern Italy, and work in the mills stopped. People believed that the disease travelled in old rags. Slowly, the mills were rebuilt. Then, after the fall of Venice in seventeen ninety-seven, the paper trade began a long decline.

Ercoliani visited in eighteen forty-six. He found many mills still working, all along the gorge, for three miles into the mountains. But business had been busier before, he said. Paper made by machines had appeared, which was not as strong as the paper of Toscolano, but looked smarter, and cost less.

In eighteen seventy-four, a road was cut into the side of the gorge, three and a half kilometres long, with wide tunnels through the rock, linking the mills to the village. By nineteen-oh-four, Solitro wrote that paper was the only old industry of the area that was still flourishing. The last mill in the valley finally closed in nineteen sixty-two. Today, one of the old mills has become a museum.

There were other trades along the shore. In the valleys above, there were forges, where iron from the mountains was made into farm tools and nails. Near Salò, people spun linen thread, and spread it out to bleach in the sun on a long pebble beach between Salò and Gardone.

And almost everywhere around the lake, there were mulberry trees. Their leaves were fed to silkworms. Pollini, writing in eighteen sixteen, described hills covered with mulberries. A German writer, visiting Riva in the eighteen thirties, wrote that the silk trade was what made the town prosperous.

The Baedeker guide adds one more small detail about the western shore. Caper bushes, it says, grow in the cracks of the old walls, which are brightened by countless little green lizards.

It is easy to imagine them now. A warm stone wall above the lake. A caper plant with its pale flowers. And a small green lizard, lying very still in the sun.

In the year eighteen twenty-seven, a new sound was heard on Lake Garda. A steady splashing and churning, and a long trail of smoke drifting over the water. The first steamboat had arrived.

It was a wooden boat, with a paddle wheel on each side, and it carried both passengers and goods. It was named the Arciduca Ranieri, after the Archduke Rainer of Austria, who was then the viceroy of Lombardy and Venetia. Most sources give the year eighteen twenty-seven for its first voyages, although a few give slightly different dates. And about ten years later, a similar steamer replaced it, running between Riva in the north and Peschiera and Desenzano in the south.

For a few years in the eighteen thirties, there was an even stranger boat on the lake. It was called the Amico a Prora, but people knew it by a nickname, the Manubrio. When it was out in open water, it sailed. But near the shore, its paddle wheel was turned by eight horses, walking round and round in a circle on the deck.

One day in the early eighteen thirties, the German writer August Lewald stood on the quay at Riva and watched the steamboat leave. Over its deck there was an awning of blue and orange. Half-naked porters carried great loads of wood on board, because the boat burned wood instead of coal. The passengers were a mixture of priests, soldiers, and well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. And as the boat pulled away from the harbour, Lewald noticed that it left behind it the strong smell of burnt fresh pine.

By eighteen forty-six, there were two steamboats on the lake, the Arciduca Ranieri and a newer boat called the Benaco. Ercoliani tells a little story about them. One afternoon, off Sirmione, a sudden storm blew up. All the sailing boats lowered their sails and ran for the nearest harbour. Only the steamboat kept going, heading north towards Riva, splitting the waves under the blows of its great paddle wheels.

Murray's handbook of eighteen fifty-two gives us the timetable. The steamer Benaco, it says, of forty-two horsepower, ran all year round. On Mondays and Fridays it went from Riva to Desenzano, along the Brescian shore, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays it came back. On Wednesdays it went down the eastern shore, from Riva to Lazise and Peschiera, and returned the next day.

The boats changed the life of the lake. Before, a journey from one end to the other might take a whole day, and depend on the winds. Now, it took a few hours. The markets were easier to reach. Ercoliani wrote that the steamboats had made it much easier for people from all around the lake to come to the big Tuesday market at Desenzano.

By eighteen sixty, according to Murray, the Austrian government steamers left Peschiera for Riva on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at one o'clock in the afternoon, timed to meet the early trains from Milan, Verona and Venice. The journey took three and a half to four hours. They stopped along the way at Limone, Tremosine, Gargnano, Malcesine, Torri, Castelletto and Bardolino. And, the handbook adds, there is a fair restaurant on board these steamers.

When the boat arrived at Riva, horse-drawn omnibuses were waiting on the quay, to carry the passengers on over the hills to Rovereto and Trento.

Not everything about steam travel was comfortable. The Baedeker guide, many years later, admitted that seasickness was not unknown in rough weather, and that storms or fog sometimes interrupted the service altogether.

But for most travellers, it was a wonderful way to see the lake. You could sit on the deck, under the striped awning, with the paddle wheels turning beside you, and watch the villages and the mountains slowly pass by.

In the spring of eighteen forty-eight, a wave of revolution swept across Europe. In Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, and in the cities of Italy, people rose up and demanded change. In Milan, the citizens fought the Austrian garrison in the streets for five days, and drove it out of the city. And the King of Piedmont, Charles Albert, declared war on Austria.

The Austrian armies, under the old Field Marshal Radetzky, fell back to a group of four great fortresses, known as the Quadrilateral. They were Verona, Mantua, Legnago, and, at the southern tip of Lake Garda, Peschiera. Their only line of supply from home ran down the valley of the Adige, just east of the lake.

So the lake was suddenly at the edge of a war.

In early April, the Austrians were driven out of Lonato and Desenzano. At Salò, the people rose against the Austrian authorities. And part of a force of Lombard volunteers, some five thousand men in all, made Salò their headquarters. Their plan was to march north into the mountains of the Trentino, and to protect the shore of the lake.

The volunteers' general proposed a daring plan, for Piedmontese troops to land on the northern shore at Riva and Nago, using two steamboats and a collection of other boats. But the Piedmontese command turned it down. Meanwhile, the volunteers marched north through the valleys, and fought small battles in the mountains, near Arco and elsewhere. In June, a group of them was in action at a pass above Tremosine, high over the lake.

The heaviest fighting was on the eastern side. On the eleventh of April, at the village of Castelnuovo, between the lake and Verona, Austrian troops attacked a group of Lombard volunteers who had occupied it. The village was set on fire, and many of its people were killed. Murray's handbook, a few years later, said that only two houses and the church remained standing.

At the end of April, the Piedmontese army won a battle at Pastrengo, near the lake. And then they turned to Peschiera.

Peschiera was a fortress town, built on islands where the river Mincio flows out of the lake. Its walls had been made very strong by the Venetians, and strengthened again since. The Piedmontese surrounded it, and in May they began to bombard it. On the thirtieth of May, the Austrian commander, General Rath, surrendered.

That same day, the King of Piedmont was on the battlefield at Goito, a little to the south. When the news of Peschiera reached him, his soldiers cheered him as the King of Italy.

But the victory did not last. That summer, Radetzky's armies struck back, and the Piedmontese were defeated. By August, the Austrians were back in Milan, and back in Peschiera, and back on the lake. The next spring, in eighteen forty-nine, the Piedmontese were beaten once more, and the war was lost.

The Italian historian Solitro, looking back, put it simply. A ray of sunshine appeared, he wrote, in eighteen forty-eight and forty-nine. Then thick darkness.

After those years, the Austrians began to fortify the northern end of the lake. They rebuilt the old castle at Riva, the Rocca, as a barracks. And over the following years, they built forts on the hills around Riva and Nago, and along the cliffs of the Ponale.

On the lake itself, life went on much as before. The steamers ran up and down. The lemon trees were covered and uncovered. The fishermen went out at night. But the soldiers in the forts were a reminder that the peace might not last.

Ten years later, in eighteen fifty-nine, war came again. This time, the Kingdom of Piedmont had a powerful ally, the Emperor Napoleon the Third of France.

In June, as the French and Piedmontese armies advanced across Lombardy, a corps of volunteers called the Hunters of the Alps, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, reached the lake. On the eighteenth of June, they entered Salò. Garibaldi wanted to cross the lake by boat, to attack the Austrians on the other side. But he was given new orders, and sent instead into the valleys behind Brescia.

There was fighting on the water too. On the twentieth of June, an Austrian gunboat, named the Benaco, was sunk off Salò by Piedmontese guns on the shore.

Four days later, on Friday the twenty-fourth of June, eighteen fifty-nine, the armies met just south of the lake, in the low green hills around the villages of Solferino and San Martino.

It was an enormous battle. On one side were the Austrians, led in person by their young Emperor, Franz Joseph. On the other were the French, led by Napoleon the Third, and the Piedmontese, led by their king, Victor Emmanuel the Second. Murray's handbook says the Austrian line stretched for nearly twelve miles. The Piedmontese stood on the left, near the southern shore of the lake, between Desenzano and Rivoltella.

The battle began at five o'clock in the morning, and lasted almost the whole day, in the heat of summer. In the afternoon, the French took the village of Solferino, with its tall medieval tower. At San Martino, nearer the lake, the Piedmontese attacked the Austrian positions again and again, until the evening. By nightfall, the Austrians had withdrawn across the river Mincio.

The cost was terrible. Tens of thousands of men were killed or wounded in a single day. The little towns around the lake were filled with the wounded. At Salò, one account says, the whole town became a great field hospital.

A young Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant happened to be travelling nearby. He went to the town of Castiglione, where thousands of wounded soldiers lay in the churches and the streets, and he helped the local women care for them. The experience changed his life. A few years later, he wrote a book about what he had seen, and it led to the founding of the Red Cross.

The tower of Solferino still stands on its hill. People called it the Spy of Italy, the watchtower of Italy, because from the top you could see for miles, across the plain, and along almost the whole length of Lake Garda, up to the mountains of the Tyrol.

There was one more unusual sight on the lake that summer. The French brought five small gunboats in pieces, over land, to Desenzano, and put them together there on the shore. Napoleon the Third came to watch, and the first of them was launched in his presence, on the fourteenth of July.

But by then, the war was almost over. On the eleventh of July, Napoleon and Franz Joseph met at the town of Villafranca, near Verona, and agreed to an armistice. Lombardy, with the western shore of the lake, would go to Piedmont, and soon to the new Kingdom of Italy. But Austria would keep Venetia, with the eastern shore, and the great fortress of Peschiera. And the northern tip, with Riva, would stay in the Tyrol.

Laura Ragg wrote that the peace of Villafranca cut the eastern shore of Garda off from the rest of the Italian lakes, and compelled it to remain Austrian, for seven more years.

So now, the border ran right through the lake.

After eighteen fifty-nine, Lake Garda was divided in two. The western shore, from Desenzano up to Limone, belonged to Italy. The eastern shore, from Peschiera up to Malcesine, belonged to Austria, and so did the whole of the northern end, around Riva and Torbole.

People who had sailed freely across the lake all their lives now had to think about customs, and passports, and soldiers.

At the end of December, eighteen fifty-nine, the Italian government opened customs offices along its new frontier, at Gargnano, at Salò, at Limone, and in the mountain valleys behind. Travellers arriving by train were checked too. Murray's handbook of eighteen sixty describes the station at Peschiera, which was now an Austrian frontier town. Here, passports and luggage were examined, and the trains waited for about an hour while it was done.

Both sides kept small fleets of gunboats on the lake. The Italian boats were based at Salò. Napoleon the Third gave several of the French gunboats to Italy, and the Italians added two new wooden steam gunboats of their own, named Solferino and San Martino, after the battles.

The Austrians built a larger fleet. Its headquarters was at Torri del Benaco, on the eastern shore, with supporting bases at Peschiera and Riva. By eighteen sixty-six, it had more than twenty boats. There were six modern gunboats, driven by screw propellers, with fierce names in German, like Wildfang, the Wild One, and Wespe, the Wasp. There were two large paddle steamers, armed with guns, called the Hess and the Franz Joseph. And there were smaller launches, and armed barges at Peschiera.

Just south of Limone, in the autumn of eighteen sixty, there was a sad accident. One of the gunboats that Napoleon had given to Piedmont, the Sesia, which had been changed to carry passengers, sank after its boiler exploded. Forty-two people lost their lives. It is remembered as the worst shipwreck on any lake in Italy. In twenty twelve, the wreck was found, almost three hundred and forty metres deep, and today a small stone monument with the names of the victims stands on the shore.

The Austrians also built forts at the northern end of the lake. A fort at Nago, on the road down from Rovereto, was finished in eighteen sixty-one. Batteries were built on the slopes of Monte Brione, the long ridge between Riva and Torbole. And on the cliffs of the Ponale, above the lake, a battery of four guns was built behind a stone wall.

And, as always happens when a border appears, people began to smuggle. Many things were much cheaper on the Austrian side than on the Italian side. A German guidebook of nineteen-oh-six says that sugar, for example, paid a duty of one lira for every kilo brought into Italy.

So at night, small boats slipped across the dark water, loaded with sugar and coffee and tobacco. And customs boats patrolled the line to catch them.

The American lecturer John Stoddard described them in nineteen-oh-three. He saw two rakish-looking craft, resembling torpedo boats, which every night, he said, cruise back and forth along the liquid frontier, directing search lights to the right and left, in order to detect and thwart any attempts at smuggling. In the days before these patrols, he wrote, a smuggler could earn more in one dark night than in a month of honest work.

At Limone, at a little headland called Reamolo, there was a small house where a customs officer lived, with a searchlight of his own, to watch for smugglers coming down the lake.

The border on the water had no fence and no wall. But later, after eighteen sixty-six, when the border had moved further north, it was marked on land by two pillars. One stood on the western shore, a little way north of Limone. The other stood on the eastern shore, about seven kilometres north of Malcesine, where a small stream runs down into the lake.

And on the harbour wall at Torbole, you can still see a little old customs house from the days of the Austrian border, when the boats from Italy had to stop there and show their papers.

In eighteen sixty-six, Italy went to war with Austria once more. This time, Italy's ally was Prussia, which was fighting Austria in the north.

The war began on the twenty-third of June. In the mountains west of the lake, Giuseppe Garibaldi once again commanded the Italian volunteers, thousands of young men in red shirts. His headquarters was at Salò.

On the third of July, at a place called Monte Suello, near Lake Idro, the volunteers fought a long battle against the Austrians, and in the end the Austrians fell back. But Garibaldi himself was wounded in the thigh. He sent a short note to his daughter, so that she would not worry. I am wounded, he wrote, with just such a wound as Anzani gets when playing. So don't heed any rumours that you may hear. For the rest of the campaign, he moved about in a carriage.

Among the volunteers wounded at Monte Suello was a young engineering student named Luigi Wimmer. He was taken prisoner by the Austrians. We will meet him again, later tonight, in a happier time.

Meanwhile, on the lake, the two fleets of gunboats faced each other.

At the end of June, Austrian boats fired on the railway station at Desenzano. On the second of July, from five o'clock in the morning until the evening, four Austrian gunboats bombarded Gargnano, until an Italian battery on the shore drove them away. A week later, they fired on the road at Bogliaco, to the great fear of the people living there.

In the middle of July, there was a small, strange battle near Gargnano. An Italian paddle steamer, the Benaco, was towing a raft loaded with supplies. Two Austrian gunboats attacked it, and forced it onto the shore. The next day, more Austrian boats came, and fired on the town, and some of the houses and the town hall caught fire. The Austrians towed the captured steamer away to Peschiera. As for the supply raft, one account says that the people of Gargnano sank it themselves, so that the Austrians could not take what was on it.

In the mountains, the volunteers pushed north. They besieged and captured a small Austrian fort at Ampola, which opened the way into the valley of Ledro. And on the twenty-first of July, at the village of Bezzecca, in the Ledro valley, there was a fierce battle. In Italy, it is remembered as a victory for Garibaldi. Some Austrian accounts saw it differently. Either way, many men were killed or wounded, far more of them Italians than Austrians, and the volunteers held on.

By then, the volunteers were close to Riva. Some of them were on the Ponale road, in the cliffs above the lake. But the guns of the Austrian forts and gunboats held them back. On the twenty-fifth of July, the Austrian marines were still holding the forts of Riva. That evening, at ten o'clock, the steamer Hess arrived in the harbour with a telegram. A ceasefire had been agreed.

The war ended quickly after that. Austria had been defeated by Prussia in the north, and agreed to give up Venetia. Garibaldi received an order to withdraw from the Trentino, which his men had partly occupied. He replied with a single word. Obbedisco. I obey. The word is still famous in Italy.

The peace was signed in Vienna, in October. The whole eastern shore of the lake, with Malcesine, Torri, Garda, Bardolino, Lazise and Peschiera, became part of the Kingdom of Italy. The Austrian gunboats were sold to Italy. The big paddle steamer Franz Joseph was given an Italian name.

But the northern tip of the lake stayed Austrian. Riva, Arco, Nago and Torbole remained in the Tyrol. The new border now crossed the lake near the top, between Limone and Malcesine on the Italian side, and Riva and Torbole on the Austrian side.

And there it would stay, for more than fifty years.

At the northern end of Lake Garda, just west of Riva, the mountains drop straight into the water in a sheer wall of rock. Behind this wall lies the green valley of Ledro, with its own small lake, and its villages and pastures.

For centuries, the people of Ledro had no easy way down to the lake. If they wanted to go to the market in Riva, they had to take a steep mule path down a gorge, beside a waterfall, and then a boat along the shore. A German guidebook says that, until about eighteen fifty, Riva itself was connected to the south only by the lake.

Then a man named Giacomo Cis had an idea. He was a merchant from the village of Bezzecca, in the Ledro valley, and he dreamed of a road that would end his valley's isolation. A road cut straight into the face of the cliff, above the lake.

Work began on the first of February, eighteen forty-eight. It was extraordinarily difficult. The first stretch, out of Riva, had to be blasted from vertical rock, high above the water, and it needed three tunnels. The road was finished on the third of January, eighteen fifty-one. It was called the Ponale road, after the river and the waterfall in the gorge.

John Stoddard drove along it by carriage, and described it in nineteen-oh-three. It commences at the limit of the town, he wrote, and is at first cut out of vertical cliffs for a considerable distance, like a slanting shelf. At one point, he leaned on the broad stone parapet and dropped a pebble from his hand. It fell all the way to the water, he said, without touching a single rock.

In the third tunnel, about half an hour's walk from Riva, there was a window cut through the rock, looking out over the lake, towards Riva and Monte Brione and Torbole. And on the wall opposite the window, there was a tablet in memory of Giacomo Cis, who planned the road, and watched over its building, from eighteen forty-eight to eighteen fifty-one.

The road became one of the great sights of the lake. Visitors came out from Riva to walk along it, or took a rowing boat to the foot of the waterfall, and walked back. The Baedeker guide of nineteen eleven says that little motor boats ran out to the waterfall three times a day, in twenty minutes. A little further up the road, there was a modest restaurant called the Belvedere, with a terrace looking down on the falls.

The waterfall of the Ponale was put to work too. By nineteen-oh-six, it was turning the turbines that made electricity for the town of Riva. And nearby, there was a deep cave in the rock, where hermits were said to have lived long ago.

Down below the road, there was a little rocky cove where people went to swim, called the Madonnina. In September of nineteen-oh-nine, a young writer from Prague, Franz Kafka, came here to bathe with his friends Max and Otto Brod, after a hot and dusty walk along the road from Riva.

But the Ponale road was also a road on a frontier. The Austrians built walls and gun positions along it, and blasted chambers for mines into the rock. In the early nineteen hundreds, they built a new fortified barrier at one of the tunnels, not far from Riva, with room for about seventy soldiers.

The road was used by cars and buses for most of the twentieth century. Then, late in the century, when new tunnels had been cut through the mountain, the old road was finally closed to traffic. Today, it has been restored as a path for walkers and cyclists. And you can still walk along that slanting shelf in the cliff, with the lake far below, just as visitors did a hundred years ago.

For more than a hundred years, from eighteen fifteen to the end of the First World War, Riva del Garda was an Austrian town. It lay at the southern edge of the old county of Tyrol, and after eighteen sixty-six, the little northern tip of the lake, around Riva and Torbole, was the only part of Lake Garda still in Austrian hands.

In the second half of the eighteen hundreds, Riva became something new. It became a resort. People from Austria and Germany, from Vienna and Munich and Prague, began to come here for the mild climate, the sunshine, and the soft air of the lake. The Baedeker guide of eighteen eighty-eight said simply, Riva is recommended for a prolonged stay. The climate is healthy, and the heat in summer is tempered by the lake.

By nineteen eleven, the town had about eight thousand people, and a great many hotels. There was the Hotel du Lac, a little way out of town on the road to Torbole, with a large garden and its own bathing house on the lake. There was the Imperial Hotel del Sole, beside the harbour. There was the Bavarian Court, where, the guidebook noted, there was music in the evening. And there was the grand new Lido Palace Hotel, which opened in the last weeks of the year eighteen ninety-nine, with a lift, hot-air heating, and a large garden.

The centre of the town was the harbour square, with its arcades, and its old clock tower, the Torre Apponale, more than thirty metres high, with a little angel on top that turned with the wind. Behind the town, an avenue of palm trees and magnolias led to the railway station. And on the edge of the water stood the old castle, the Rocca, surrounded by its moat, which was now a barracks for Austrian soldiers.

At midday, the guide says, the heat was tempered by a cool wind from the lake, the so-called Ora, and in the afternoon the whole town lay in the shadow of the hills.

In eighteen eighty-eight, a doctor from Vienna named Christoph von Hartungen moved to Riva and opened a sanatorium. It was not a hospital for serious illnesses. It was a place for rest, and fresh air, and simple food, and cold water cures, and sunbathing in little wooden huts among the trees. People came for weeks at a time, to recover from overwork and nervous exhaustion.

Many writers and artists came to stay. The brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann came here. So did the poet Christian Morgenstern, and the novelist Hermann Sudermann. Heinrich Mann wrote, in nineteen-oh-two, that Doctor von Hartungen was a real doctor, and therefore of a very rare kind.

In September of nineteen-oh-nine, Franz Kafka came to Riva for the first time, with his friend Max Brod. They travelled from Prague to Munich, and then on the night train through Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass, and took the little local railway down to the lake. They spent about ten days here, swimming and walking, and went to see an air show in Brescia, where the first aeroplanes were flying. Kafka wrote a short newspaper article about it.

Four years later, in the autumn of nineteen thirteen, Kafka came back alone, and stayed for three weeks at the Hartungen sanatorium. Years afterwards, he began a strange, dreamlike story set in a little harbour, where a boat arrives one day, carrying a dead hunter, and the man who comes down to greet it is the mayor of Riva.

The town had other faces too. Timber from the mountains was piled up in one of the squares, waiting to be shipped south to Italy, where wood was scarce. And it was a garrison town, full of Austrian soldiers, with their barracks in the old castle, and their forts on the hills. In nineteen ten, Riva was officially declared a fortress.

John Stoddard, arriving from the north in nineteen-oh-three, felt the change in the air. Though this part of Lake Garda is Tyrolean territory, he wrote, I feel already that I am in another land.

A few kilometres north of Riva, up the valley of the river Sarca, lies the little town of Arco. Above it, on a tall, steep rock, stand the ruins of an old castle. And all around it, on the slopes, there are olive groves.

The valley here is sheltered on every side by mountains. The cold winds of winter pass it by. And so, already in the eighteen thirties, the German writer August Lewald noted that Arco was the refuge of all the people with weak lungs from the region, in this mild corner, protected from the storms.

But Arco really became famous in eighteen seventy-one. That year, the Archduke Albrecht of Austria, one of the most important men in the empire, chose Arco for his winter stays. Soon a stately villa stood on the slope below the olive groves, in a large park, with a beautiful winter garden. And where an Archduke went, others followed.

Arco became a Kurort, a health resort, for the winter months. People came especially for diseases of the lungs, and of the heart, and of the nerves. A list of visitors in eighteen seventy-two already had more than two hundred names. In eighteen seventy-eight, a large Kurhaus opened, a spa hotel, and the number of guests began to rise quickly. By eighteen eighty-nine, there were well over a thousand every winter.

A little German book about the resort, written by a man named Kuntze in eighteen eighty-nine, describes its daily life. There were concerts every day in the Kur garden, and twice a day in spring and autumn. There were balls and gatherings in the Kursaal, the great hall. There were Viennese coffee houses with billiard tables, and lending libraries with books in several languages. There was even an amateur theatre. The rooms in the hotels had double windows, and tiled stoves to keep them warm.

He even gives the hotel timetable. Breakfast from seven until ten. Dinner at one o'clock, with soup, and a small dish, and beef, and roast meat with salad and stewed fruit, and pudding, and dessert. And supper at seven.

Out in the streets, he heard the church bells, and the cries of the sellers of vegetables and lemons, and the shouts of men playing a ball game in the square. There was even, he says, a Munich beer hall, kept by an old Swede named Jönson.

In the eighteen eighties, a casino was built, lit by electric light, and the Archduke gave the town a pavilion for medical treatments. In eighteen ninety, fresh drinking water was brought down to the town from the mountains, along a new aqueduct. And the next year, a little railway arrived, linking Arco with Riva and with the main line to the north.

The guidebooks kept count of the town. Two thousand four hundred people in eighteen eighty-eight. Four thousand five hundred by nineteen eleven. And the Baedeker guide described its winter guests, frankly, as consumptive, cardiac, and nervous patients. In summer, it said, there were few visitors.

The Archduke Albrecht died in Arco, in February of eighteen ninety-five. The year before, another royal visitor had died here too. Francis the Second, the last King of the Two Sicilies, who had lost his kingdom when Italy was united, spent his last days in this quiet town under the mountains.

Arco was also the birthplace of a painter, Giovanni Segantini, born here in eighteen fifty-eight. He became famous for his paintings of the high Alps, full of clear mountain light. In nineteen-oh-nine, a bronze statue of him was put up near the Kur park.

Stoddard, who visited in nineteen-oh-three, called Arco a miniature Meran, after the great spa town in the Tyrol. It can boast, he wrote, of a casino, daily concerts, lovely walks, and other attractions.

The walks were the best part. Paths wound up between ancient olive groves, towards the castle on its rock. And from up there, on a clear winter afternoon, you could look down over the rooftops of Arco, and the green valley of the Sarca, all the way to the blue water of the lake.

For most of history, people came to Lake Garda on foot, or on horseback, or in a carriage, or by boat down the rivers. In the eighteen hundreds, the railway arrived.

The first line to reach the lake was the great railway between Milan and Venice. It was built slowly, in sections, under Austrian rule. In April of eighteen fifty-four, the stretch passing the southern end of the lake was opened, with new stations at Desenzano and Peschiera, a bridge over the river Mincio, and a long viaduct at Desenzano. From then on, a traveller could come by train from Venice or Verona, and a few years later from Milan as well, step off at Desenzano, and ride down by omnibus to the harbour to catch the steamer.

For a few years after eighteen fifty-nine, the station at Peschiera was a frontier station, where the trains waited while passports and luggage were checked.

To the north, a railway came down from Austria, over the Brenner Pass and through the valley of the Adige. It reached Trento and Verona in eighteen fifty-nine, and in eighteen sixty-seven, it was finally joined to Innsbruck, over the mountains. But it did not touch the lake. The nearest station was at a small town called Mori, about seventeen kilometres from Riva by road, on the far side of the hills.

So for many years, travellers from the north got off the train at Mori, and finished their journey by road. In eighteen eighty-eight, the Baedeker guide says, an omnibus ran from Mori to Riva three times a day, taking almost three hours. When it was full, extra open carriages were added. Or you could hire your own carriage, with one horse, or two. The guide recommended this road, for the magnificent view of the lake that suddenly opens up, as you come over the hill at Nago.

Then, in January of eighteen ninety-one, a little railway was opened, linking Mori with Arco and Riva. It was a narrow-gauge line, only seventy-six centimetres between the rails, and about twenty-four kilometres long. It climbed over the hills past Nago, and down into the valley of the Sarca. It was not fast. The journey took more than an hour, at less than twenty kilometres an hour.

John Stoddard took it in nineteen-oh-three. We left the Brenner railway, he wrote, at a little town called Mori, and seated ourselves in one of a series of diminutive cars. The little train became very popular. In its best year, nineteen thirteen, it carried three hundred and fifty thousand passengers.

At Riva, the line ended near the water. The Baedeker guide explains that there was a pier at the station, for steamboats in connection with the trains. So you could step off the little train, walk a few steps, and board the steamer for the south.

From Munich to Mori, a German guidebook says, the journey took about ten hours. From Vienna, about eighteen.

From the south, it was easier. From Milan, an express train reached Desenzano in about two and a quarter hours. A little tramway linked the station with the harbour. And from Brescia, a steam tram ran out to Salò, from eighteen eighty-seven, with many little stops along the way. The Baedeker guide warned, rather drily, that punctuality was by no means assured.

The guidebooks of those years offered circular tickets, for a round tour. You could go from Riva down the lake by steamer to Desenzano, then by train to Milan and Verona, then back up to Mori, and down again to Riva. The tickets were valid for fifteen days.

And so, little by little, the lake was opened to the world. People could now come from Berlin, or Vienna, or London, in a few days. And many of them came in winter, looking for the sun.

On the western shore, between Salò and Maderno, there is a small town called Gardone Riviera. In the eighteen seventies, it was a quiet village of fishermen and lemon growers. Within a few years, it became one of the most fashionable winter resorts in this part of Europe.

It began with one man. His name was Luigi Wimmer. He had been born in Austria, in eighteen forty-two, and had fought as a volunteer with Garibaldi, and had been wounded at Monte Suello, in eighteen sixty-six, as we heard earlier. He became an engineer, and built railways in the Austrian Alps. And he fell in love with this sheltered corner of the lake.

In eighteen seventy-seven, Wimmer and his family bought an old estate above Gardone. In the early eighteen eighties, they opened their first hotel, called the Pizzocolo, after the mountain behind the town. Wimmer became the mayor. He built an aqueduct, and a landing stage for the steamboats, in the square that is still named after him.

He died young, in eighteen eighty-three. But his widow, Emilia, carried on, and enlarged the family hotel into the Grand Hotel of Gardone Riviera. It grew and grew, through the eighteen eighties and nineties, until it was one of the largest hotels on the lake.

German doctors began to write about Gardone in their medical journals, praising its climate. The Baedeker guide of eighteen ninety-nine says that it was an almost unknown village until the eighteen eighties, but had become within the last few years a favourite winter resort, for consumptive and nervous invalids.

The guide is full of numbers about the weather. Gardone, it says, is sheltered from the north winds. Eighty per cent of the days of the year are free from wind. In January, there are about a hundred and sixty-seven hours of sunshine. And in the gardens, camellias, magnolias and palms grow without any protection, all through the winter.

The season was the winter. The hotels were usually closed from the middle of May until the middle of September, and often overcrowded in February and March. Stoddard noticed that many of these votaries of the sun, as he called them, stayed on until April. He had been told that the midwinter temperature differed from that of Nice by only two degrees.

Most of the guests came from Germany and Austria. By nineteen-oh-six, there was a German newspaper, published every Sunday, with the list of new arrivals. There was a German school, and a German Protestant church, at the neighbouring village of Fasano. A small tax was paid by each visitor, to pay for paths and gardens and music.

You could hire a rowing boat with a boatman, for a lira and a half for the first hour. Or a donkey, to ride up into the hills, from a man the guidebook calls, simply, the donkey man.

Some guests came every winter, for years. The German writer Paul Heyse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen ten, spent his winters in a villa at Gardone, and wrote a collection of short stories set on the lake. In the spring of nineteen-oh-three, the King of Saxony stayed in the Wimmer family's villa.

In the winter season of nineteen twelve to nineteen thirteen, Gardone welcomed more than twelve thousand guests.

The days had a gentle rhythm. A late breakfast on the terrace, looking out at the water. A walk along the shore, under the palm trees, or up through the olive groves. Lunch. A rest. Perhaps a boat trip to the island, or to Salò. Tea. A concert in the evening. And all around, the soft winter light on the lake, and the snow on the mountains far away to the north.

It was a peaceful world. But it would not last much longer.

As the visitors came, the steamboats grew larger, and more elegant.

In eighteen eighty-five, two new steamers were launched, each able to carry three hundred passengers. A few years later, more were added. By the eighteen nineties, there were several boats running every day, up and down both shores.

The Baedeker guide of eighteen eighty-eight gives the times. On the eastern shore, a steamer left Riva every morning at five o'clock, and reached Peschiera four hours later. On the western shore, a steamer left Riva at six o'clock, and reached Desenzano in four and a quarter hours. It called at Limone, Tremosine, Tignale, Gargnano, Maderno, Gardone, Salò and San Felice. And with a little planning, you could go all the way round the lake in a single day, by steamer, and train, and steamer again.

The guide was honest about the service. In eighteen eighty-eight, it said, the steamboats were apt to be irregular and unpunctual, and the refreshments poor. But by eighteen ninety-nine, it had changed its mind. The new steamers, it said, are good and clean.

Some of the stops had no pier at all. At Tremosine, where the village sits high on the cliffs above the lake, Stoddard watched a little boat come out from the foot of the mountain, to meet the steamer, and take off the passengers and their sacks.

He also noticed a moment that every passenger must have felt. About an hour after leaving Riva, he wrote, we glide across an invisible line of demarcation. The border. And from time to time, he said, musicians came on board, to play for the passengers, and left again at the next stop, their music echoing softly from the olive-mantled hills.

The navigation company ordered a great new paddle steamer from the firm of Escher Wyss, in Zurich. It was built at the shipyard in Peschiera, and launched on the twenty-fifth of September, nineteen-oh-three, in the presence of the Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Zanardelli, who came from Brescia. The ship was named after him. He died just three months later.

The Zanardelli was the largest boat on the lake. It was almost fifty metres long, with a steel hull, and two great paddle wheels, each two and a half metres across, driven by a steam engine of about four hundred horsepower. It could carry eight hundred passengers. It sailed the length of the lake, from Riva to Peschiera, calling at Limone, Malcesine, Torri, Garda, Bardolino, Lazise and Sirmione.

Six years later, on the fifth of May, nineteen-oh-nine, a second great paddle steamer made her first voyage. She was called the Italia. She was so large that, according to one story, the Austrian customs officers at Riva were impressed, and would not let her dock.

In nineteen eleven, a ticket from one end of the lake to the other cost about four and a half francs in first class. On Sundays in summer and autumn, there were special holiday tickets, valid on the whole lake all day. And the steamers, the guide says, were furnished with tolerable restaurants.

There is something wonderful about these two old ships. They still sail on Lake Garda today. Their steam engines were replaced long ago with diesel engines, but they still have their great paddle wheels, turning slowly on either side, and their old-fashioned saloons. You can still go aboard the Italia, and the Zanardelli still sails on special trips, so you can sit on the deck, and cross the lake, just as the visitors did a hundred and twenty years ago.

Off the western shore, near the little town of San Felice, lies the largest island in Lake Garda. It is long and narrow, a little over a kilometre from end to end. Today it is called the Isola del Garda. In the eighteen hundreds, it was often called the Isola Lechi, after the family that owned it.

There is an old tradition that Saint Francis of Assisi founded a small hermitage here, in the twelve hundreds, and that the poet Dante came to visit the friars. Later, there was a monastery on the island. But at the very end of the seventeen hundreds, the monastery was closed, and the monks went away.

In eighteen seventeen, the island was bought by Count Luigi Lechi of Brescia. He built a little harbour with a boathouse and a small tower. And he had secrets. In the summer of eighteen twenty-one, the Austrian police searched the island, and found a small portable printing press, with tiny type. Lechi belonged to a secret society that dreamed of freeing Italy from Austrian rule. He was arrested and put on trial, and he could not return to his island until eighteen twenty-five.

The Lechi family kept the island for a while longer. In those years, Ercoliani says, it produced two hundred thousand lemons a year, along with wine and oil.

Then, after eighteen fifty-nine, the island found itself close to the new border, which ran down the middle of the lake. The Italian government took it over, and began to build a fortress, and kept soldiers there for a time. After eighteen sixty-six, when the border moved north, the fortress was no longer needed, and was abandoned.

Around eighteen seventy, the island was sold to a nobleman from Genoa, the Duke de Ferrari, and his wife, Maria Annenkova, who came from a noble Russian family. The sources do not quite agree on the exact year, or even on the Duke's first name. But they agree on what happened next.

The Duke and Duchess set out to turn the rocky island into a garden. Huge quantities of soil were brought over by boat from the mainland, and retaining walls were built along the shore. Over the following decades, an English-style park was planted, with paths winding among exotic trees and flowers, and a formal Italian garden in front of the house.

And then they built a villa. It was designed by the architect Luigi Rovelli, and built in the eighteen nineties and the first years of the nineteen hundreds, in a style inspired by the Gothic palaces of Venice. Solitro wrote that its southern front, with the tall tower beside it, reminded him of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Stoddard thought so too. It is a partial reproduction of the Doges' Palace, he wrote, if not in its entire form, still in the Gothic arches of its tower and porticos.

The Duke died in eighteen ninety-three, before it was finished. His daughter, Anna Maria, married a Roman prince, Scipione Borghese, who became famous a few years later, in nineteen-oh-seven, when he won a car race from Peking to Paris, across Asia and Europe, in sixty days.

In those years, visitors at Gardone could hire a rowing boat and be rowed out to the island in about three quarters of an hour. They could not go inside. But they could look at the walls of the villa, rising above the trees, and the tower, and the garden running down to the water.

Stoddard was clearly a little envious. I do not know a place on earth, he wrote, where one is likelier to break the tenth commandment, than the immediate vicinity of Isola di Garda. The tenth commandment, of course, is the one about not wishing for your neighbour's house.

In September of nineteen twelve, a young English writer and the woman he loved came walking down over the Alps into Italy. His name was David Herbert Lawrence. She was Frieda von Richthofen. They had very little money. And they found a house to rent, in a hamlet called Villa, just beside Gargnano, right on the water. The house was called the Villa Igea.

They stayed there through the winter, until the spring of nineteen thirteen. Lawrence was finishing a novel, which would be published that year, called Sons and Lovers. And he was also writing down, in a series of sketches, the life he saw around him. A few years later, in nineteen sixteen, they were published in a book called Twilight in Italy.

We have already met him several times tonight, watching the men walk along the tops of the lemon house pillars, and lying in bed, listening to the panels being opened. Those scenes come from his chapter called The Lemon Gardens.

In the morning, he wrote, I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back.

His landlord, whom he calls simply the Signore, owned the lemon gardens next door. He was an old gentleman, a little sad, a little anxious about money. One day he came, very seriously, to ask Lawrence's help with an American patent door spring, whose instructions were written in English. And on Christmas Day, he gave Lawrence the key to his private box at the village theatre, a key with a little bronze shield, marked with the number eight.

The theatre was in an old church. That winter, a travelling company of actors came, and Lawrence and Frieda went to see them. They saw a play by Ibsen, and a play by D'Annunzio, and Hamlet, performed in Italian. The women of the village, Lawrence noticed, all sat together on one side, as if they were still in church.

He went walking in the hills above the village, past the two old churches. There was the church of San Francesco, beside the lake, with its old cloister, the pillars carved with leaves and fruit. And high above, there was the church of San Tommaso, which he called the church of the eagle, perched over the village.

On one of these walks, he came upon an old woman, spinning wool beside the path. She held the wool on a long stick under her arm, and twisted the thread with her fingers, while the spindle turned below. She was spinning, he wrote, spontaneously, like a little wind.

Towards the end of their stay, Lawrence and Frieda moved up into the hills, to a farmhouse called San Gaudenzio, near the village of Muslone. The family who lived there were poor. They ate polenta at midday, and vegetable soup in the evening. One of them, Paolo, had once gone far away, to America, to California, to work in the gold mines, and had come home again. Many men from these villages did the same. They went to America, worked for a few years, and came back. Or did not come back.

Lawrence also met a man the village called Il Duro, the hard one, who had worked in America for seven years. And a young man named John, who had also been in America, and could speak English. In a little inn in the hills, a young mule driver gave up his seat in the chimney for Lawrence, who sat by a fire of olive sticks, burning in the open chimney, and drank coffee with milk and rum.

Today, a small marble plaque, high on the wall of the old Villa Igea, remembers that he lived there. And when you walk along the shore at Gargnano, past the little harbour, where the fishing boats still come in, it is not hard to imagine him, a thin young man, standing by the water in the winter light, watching the lake, and writing everything down.

What was it like, to live in a village on Lake Garda, in the years around nineteen hundred?

For many places, the lake was the only road. Limone, at the foot of its great cliffs, was entirely dependent on the lake for any contact with the outside world. A German guidebook says so plainly, in nineteen-oh-six. There was no road north, and no road south. Only the boat, or the steep mule paths over the mountains. The coast road, the Gardesana, would not reach Limone until about nineteen thirty.

At Tremosine, high on the cliffs, the village stood more than three hundred metres above the water. Stoddard wrote that all the baggage of the passengers had to be hauled up to the village by strong wires and a windlass.

The lemon houses were still there, but times were hard. Stoddard listed the troubles of the lake people, one after the other. The illness of the silkworm. The blight of the vines. The injury to the mulberry trees. And the disease of the lemons.

And so many people left. In the years around nineteen hundred, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated every year, to the Americas and elsewhere. From Tremosine, many went to a town called North Adams, in Massachusetts, in the United States. The voyage across the ocean took more than two weeks. Some came back with a little money saved, and built a house, or bought a piece of land. Others stayed away for good.

There were new things too. At Campione, a little delta of flat land below the cliffs, a businessman built a cotton mill in the eighteen nineties, and a village for its workers.

A German guidebook of nineteen-oh-six gives us the prices of daily life on the Italian shore. A kilo of bread cost forty centesimi. A litre of milk, twenty. A litre of wine, fifty or sixty. A kilo of carpione, the precious trout of the lake, cost three or four lire. And a maid earned fifteen or twenty lire a month.

The days followed the rhythm of the seasons, and of the church. There were saints' days, and processions, and feasts. There were markets in the squares. At Desenzano, Helena Waters saw the deep arcades around the market place, and the tiny harbour, packed with small boats from Saturday night until Monday morning.

At Arco, in the eighteen eighties, the church bells rang across the square, and the sellers of vegetables and lemons went through the streets, calling out their wares.

In the evenings, in the hill villages, people sat around the fire. By day, Lawrence watched an old woman spinning wool in the sun beside a church, and the fishermen, as we have heard, knotted their nets at home on winter evenings. And everyone talked about the weather, and the wind, which was always a little different from yesterday.

Stoddard was struck by the regularity of the wind. The Ora, the southern wind of noon, came, he wrote, with almost as much regularity as the ocean tides. And a north wind rose about midnight, for the sailing boats going south.

So the boats went out with the night wind, and came home with the wind of the afternoon. The fishermen slept by day, under the olive trees. The lemon gardens were opened and closed. The bells rang. The steamers came and went, twice a day, with their paddle wheels splashing. And the lake went on, keeping its own slow time.

In the summer of nineteen fourteen, the First World War began. At first, Italy stayed out of it. But in May of nineteen fifteen, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. And the old border at the northern end of Lake Garda became a front line.

The border still followed the line drawn in eighteen sixty-six. And in the west, at its lowest point, it came right down to the water of Lake Garda, near Riva, only sixty-five metres above sea level. On either side, the front climbed into the high mountains. Here, it touched the lake.

As soon as the war began, the Austrian authorities ordered the people of the villages near the front to leave their homes. The people of Nago and Torbole, of the Ledro valley, of Arco and the plain of the Sarca, were put on trains and sent far away, to Bohemia and Moravia, and to camps in Austria. The people of Ledro were told they would be away for a few days. They did not come home for four years.

On the Italian side, the people of Limone also had to leave. Some went first to Tremosine, high on the cliffs. The rest were evacuated in nineteen sixteen. Some were sent to Gardone, where the hotels now stood empty, because all the German and Austrian guests had gone.

Riva was now a fortress town on the front line. Its forts stood in a half circle around it, on Monte Brione, on the Rocchetta, along the Ponale. Facing them, Italian soldiers dug in on the mountains above Malcesine, around Monte Altissimo, and on the ridges south of the Ledro valley. From up there, they could look across the water towards Riva.

The lemon gardens had a part to play too. The army needed timber, and the owners had to hand over all the boards that covered the lemon houses in winter. For many gardens, that was the end.

The steamers went to war. On the twenty-third of May, nineteen fifteen, the Zanardelli and the rest of the fleet sailed back to Peschiera, with their lights out. The Zanardelli was painted grey, armed, and used to carry troops and supplies. The Italia carried refugees away from the war zone. Small fast motor torpedo boats, called MAS, patrolled the water.

For more than three years, the war went on in the mountains above the lake. There was shelling, and there were air raids, by the first military aeroplanes, on Riva and Malcesine and Desenzano and other towns. Many buildings were damaged, and many soldiers lost their lives on the mountain slopes.

The quiet sanatorium of Doctor von Hartungen closed its doors. The doctor himself spent the last of his life caring for wounded soldiers, and died in the spring of nineteen seventeen.

When Helena Waters came to the northern end of the lake a few years after the war, she could still see the traces. Looking across the lake, she wrote, you could still see the black lines of the barbed wire, on the slopes of Monte Altissimo. And the whole of the Ponale road, she wrote, had been heavily mined by the Austrians.

We do not need to dwell on it all tonight. It is enough to know that, for a while, the lake that had seen so many armies was once again a frontier, and that its people suffered, and waited, and hoped for the end.

And at last, in the autumn of nineteen eighteen, the end came.

At the beginning of November, nineteen eighteen, the Austro-Hungarian army was falling apart. On the third of November, at a villa near Padua called the Villa Giusti, an armistice was signed. It came into force the next afternoon, on the fourth of November. And on the third, Italian troops had already entered Trento.

In Riva, the main square beside the harbour is still called the Piazza Third of November.

A year later, in nineteen nineteen, a peace treaty made it official. Riva, and Arco, and Torbole, and the whole of the Trentino, became part of Italy. For the first time in sixty years, the whole lake belonged to a single country again.

Slowly, life came back. The refugees returned from Bohemia and Moravia, to find their houses damaged, and their fields overgrown. In the spring of nineteen nineteen, the army started a bus service from Riva to Arco and Mori, while the little railway was repaired. The steamers went back to carrying passengers.

When Helena Waters visited Riva in March of nineteen twenty-four, she found that only ten houses in the whole town had escaped damage from the shelling. But the old clock tower in the harbour square, the Torre Apponale, had survived. The guns, she wrote, had only carried away its little dome. Refugees were still living in huts on the road to Varone, outside the town, wishing to return to Riva.

But she also noticed how much easier it was to travel now. There was no longer a border to cross on the lake, no Austrian customs house, no need to change your money and speak German. The whole of this beautiful lake, she wrote, is now in the hands of the Italians, who will welcome the arrival of English visitors there.

And so our evening on the lake comes to its end.

It is winter now, on Lake Garda. The visitors have gone home. The hotels are closed, and the cafés along the harbour have stacked up their chairs. The lake is very still, and grey, and the mountains to the north are white with snow.

On the western shore, the white pillars of the old lemon gardens stand in their rows on the terraces, like the ruins of temples, just as Lawrence described them. In a few of them, the boards and the windows have been put up again for the winter, and inside, in the dim, cool air, the lemons are slowly ripening, and there is a faint scent of blossom.

On the eastern shore, the olive trees stand on the hills, silver and grey, waiting for the pickers with their tall ladders.

In the little harbours, the boats rock gently on their ropes. Tonight, the wind from the north will come down the lake, as it always does, around midnight. And tomorrow, at noon, the Ora will come back from the south.

Somewhere out on the dark water, an old paddle steamer is coming home to its harbour, its lights reflected in the lake, its great wheels turning slowly, and then more slowly, and then stopping.

We have travelled a long way tonight. Through the years of Napoleon, and the lemon gardens, and the fishermen's nets. Past the steamboats and the soldiers, the border on the water and the smugglers in the night. Through the winter resorts with their palm trees and their concerts, and the little railway climbing over the hills. To a young English writer, lying in bed in Gargnano, listening to the sound of the lemon houses being opened in the morning sun.

All of them have gone. And the lake is still here. Holding the light. Keeping its own slow time.

So let the water carry you now. There is nothing more you need to do tonight.

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