Lake Garda Plant

Finally we arrived to Garda Lake,its balmy climate is Garda's big selling-point. The lake acts as a gigantic solar panel, and a ring of mountains stores the heat. Como and Maggiore perform the same trick, but to night-time swings in temperature, as there is a lesser mountains between it and the high Alps. On hot summer days, the famous lake winds,the morning sover, or suer, which blows from the north,and the warmer ora,keep things bearable. These winds can change character and name,like Lewis Carroll's Snark: for example, the sover may mutate into a dangerous galeforce balinot. But whatever the wind, a colorful flutter of windsurfers can usually be seen taking advantage of it to skim over the water.Sirmione is the obvious point of departure for a clockwise tour of the Lake. The ancient Romans, perhaps the first civilization to discover the holiday home, were well aware of the charms of this peninsula, which wags a crooked finger from the southern shore of Garda.These days, of course, Sirmione is wholly given up to tourism of a more hit-and-run variety, but that doesn't lessen its powers of seduction, however. The Rocca Scaligera, with its

highly elegant crenellations and swan-filled moat, is so photogenic that it might have been built by the local tourist board. And once the funnel-like main shopping street has been left behind, Sirmione loosens its belt and relaxes into a surprisingly green and peaceful headland covered in olive trees and cypresses, and occupied by the occasional garden hotel (the sumptuous Villa Cortine being the pick of the crop. There is also a huge, old fashioned thermal establishment which takes hot,sulphurous water from a spring that gurgles from the bottom of the lake a few hundred meters offshore. The other towns on the southern shore,Desenzano to the west and Peschiera

to the east, do have a certain bustling sense of style, but they are too dose to Milan and Verona to make good holiday bases. About 10km north of the lake's southwestern corner, however.  Punta Portese marks the beginning of the Riviera Bresciana. This is Garda's rather smaller scale version of the Còte d'Azur which takes in the towns of Salò and Gardone Riviera. Salò has the busy life of a prosperous town, with the boats and the cafés, the entwined lovers on lakeside benches, the twisting back streets with their bijou shops.The town's sinister associations ,it was the capital of Mussolini's puppet government after the rout of September 1943, famous for doing nothing much except bussing in the whores from Milan, are nowhere reflected in the mood of the place, which is both elegant and vivacious. It has an Art Nouveau soul (known in Italian as 'liberty' style), which is nowhere more in evidence than in the friezed and fronded dining room of the Hotel Laurin. Gardone Riviera has no real focus: from a car it is little more than a road between high hotel walls and hedges. But the motorist's loss is the coddled guest's gain, as the whole shore is monopolized by hotels,the Grand Hotel Gardone Riviera, the Villa Fiordalisa, the Grand Hotel Fasano Villa Principe which make the most of their frontage, and take one back to the palm court glory days, when European royalty and heads of state piled into Gardone, intellectuals such as Frederick Nietzsche carne to ponder why nihilist supermen always seem to get the best hotels, and the Italian aesthete and warmonger Gabriele D'Annunzio took an Art Nouveau villa and its surrounding park and turned it into a monument to himself.D'Annunzio's Vittoriale degli Italiani is like a decadent Disneyland, the twisted creation of a proto-fascist with a taste for silk dressing gowns. There is a house, where the poet lived behind colored panes of glass with his cigar cases and a stuffed giant .

Peschiera, imagination, where you might see a priest on a vintage Moto Guzzi). The eastern shore of the lake is dominated by the long ridge of Monte Baldo, which rises more than 2,000 m. to the peak of Punta Telegrafo. It's a surprisingly verdant mountain, spared by the last glaciation, where rhododendrons, gentians and rare orchids bloom. The best way to exylore it is by taking the cable car from Malcesine, which is the main town of the upper shore, and one of the most picturesque on the whole lake. The old town tumbles over a promontory and is crowned by another pretty Scaliger castle; pebble cobbled lanes lead down to a tiny lakeside frontage.  Most of the hotels sprawl along the busy road, so Malcesine is ideal only as a day trip destination. The best way to approach it is from Riva, Salò or the town of Garda, on one of the curious triple-decker ferries that looks like a cross between a Mississippi steamer and the Wolverhampton DSS office. Beyond castle crowned Torri del Benaco, the mountains subside into a series of rolling,