Lake Garda

Where it sits. Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy, covering about 370 square kilometres, 51 kilometres long and up to 17 wide, with a maximum depth of some 346 metres. It straddles three regions: Lombardy on the western shore, Veneto on the eastern, and Trentino at the northern tip around Riva del Garda. The lake has two entirely different halves. The north is a glacial trench barely three kilometres across, walled by the cliffs of Monte Baldo to the east and the Ledro range to the west, a corridor that looks and behaves like a fjord. The south opens into a broad amphitheatre of morainic hills, with the long thin Sirmione peninsula reaching out into it and the vineyards of Lugana, Bardolino and Valtenesi around the rim.

The story behind it. Because the water moderates the climate, olives, lemons and cypresses grow here far north of where they ought to; Goethe recorded the shock of it on his Italian journey in 1786. The Republic of Venice fortified the eastern shore, and the Scaliger lords of Verona built the crenellated water castles at Sirmione, begun around 1277, and at Malcesine and Torri del Benaco. At Sirmione's tip stand the Grotte di Catullo, the ruins of a large Roman villa of the first century BC. Limone sul Garda preserves the terraced limonaie, the pillared lemon houses that were roofed and glazed each winter to grow citrus commercially until the trade collapsed in the nineteenth century. Above Gardone Riviera, Gabriele d'Annunzio built the Vittoriale degli Italiani between 1921 and 1938, an estate that includes his house, a mausoleum, an open-air theatre and the entire prow of the warship Puglia embedded in the hillside.

On screen. Lake Garda opens Quantum of Solace (2008) with the pre-title car chase, one of the most kinetic sequences in the modern Bond films. Bond, driving an Aston Martin DBS V12 with Mr White in the boot, is pursued by two Alfa Romeo 159s along the western cliffs. The road is genuinely there and genuinely alarming: the Gardesana Occidentale, the SS45bis, threads between Limone sul Garda and Gargnano through a chain of rock galleries and tunnels blasted into the cliff, and the sequence uses their strobing light and blind exits for most of its momentum. Second-unit work extended above Tremosine sul Garda onto the Strada della Forra, a road cut in 1913 up the Brasa gorge that climbs from the lake in a series of tunnels so narrow that two cars can barely pass. The chase then cuts inland to the Carrara marble quarries in Tuscany before the film reaches Siena. Anyone driving these roads today should recognise them within a kilometre; the DBS loses a door on the SS45bis, and the crash of the pursuing Alfa was staged in the same galleries.

What you actually see today. The lake divides neatly by interest. The north around Torbole and Riva is a wind-sports capital, thanks to two dependable thermal winds: the Peler blows from the north from dawn until late morning, the Ora comes up from the south through the afternoon and holds until sunset, which effectively guarantees sailing and windsurfing conditions from spring to autumn. Malcesine on the eastern shore has a cable car with rotating cabins that lifts to 1,760 metres on Monte Baldo, a ridge famous among botanists since the sixteenth century for its endemic alpine flora and now a paragliding launch. The south is gentler: Sirmione's Roman ruins and thermal springs, Desenzano's Roman villa mosaics, Peschiera's Venetian fortress, and Gardaland just inland, the largest theme park in Italy. Cyclists have the Ciclopista del Garda, a long-term project to ring the lake, of which the spectacular Limone stretch is already open as a walkway cantilevered off the cliff above the water on steel brackets. On the Lombard shore the Valtenesi and Lugana vineyards produce crisp white Lugana from the Turbiana grape, and the hills behind Bardolino on the Veronese side turn out the light red of the same name.

Getting there and timing. Desenzano del Garda and Peschiera del Garda both sit on the Milan–Venice main line, roughly an hour from Milan and 20 minutes from Verona, and both have ferry piers. Verona and Bergamo airports are the closest. Navigazione Lago di Garda runs scheduled boats and car ferries, of which the Toscolano-Maderno to Torri del Benaco crossing is the useful mid-lake link. May, June and September are the best all-round months; July and August bring heavy German and Italian holiday traffic onto shore roads that are narrow and tunnelled with no room to overtake. Water temperatures reach the low twenties by late summer. Winter is mild but many hotels and boats on the northern shore close from November to March.