Around Lake Garda

 This morning we hopped on the bus, leaving Cremona behind, and headed up to Lake Garda, about an hour away.  Our first stop was Sirmione, which is on the spit of land sticking into Lake Garda.  The poet Catullus wrote about Sirmione as his most beautiful place on earth - well for him, within the Roman Empire.

So we get to Sirmione and it’s raining.  It’s actually been raining the last couple of days.  But, we want to take a boat trip anyway…just because.  It was quite a challenge with the rain, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Here we are on the boat:

Even though they had covers overhead, water and rain were an issue.  But hey, when we look back on this, we’ll just laugh about it.  There were some interesting moments.

When we started out, the boat driver (who did not speak English very well at all) started up some Latin music.  Well, that didn’t go over very well on a boat filled with classical musicians.  We tried to tell him, but he didn’t understand, although he did turn it off.  After a while, I did a Google translate to explain who we were.  Next thing you know, he has Pavarotti singing, which was very acceptable.  So we had some classical music the rest of the way.  After everyone cheered after the first song, he turned around to take a bow.  Anyway, we had fun.

This castle, Scaligero Castle, was built in the 13th/14th century, and was controlled by Venice from 1405 until its fall.  Essentially, a home for the Della Scala family who ruled the Verona area.  A shot of it from the water, and from the town.

 

Above I mentioned Catullus loving Sirmione.  He built a home here on the point of this spit of land, which was much later called a grotto (cave) because of the state of the building - ruins.  So it’s now a Roman ruin, called Grotte di Catullo.  It was originally built in the 1st century BC.

And you can barely make out the start of the Italian Alps behind.  Unfortunately, lots of cloud cover.

This guy was watching us from our group meeting point.  Kinda creepy.

We wandered around a bit into the town, but it was past lunch time, so we sat down to have a bite to eat before heading back to the bus and on to our hotel.

We arrived at the Desenzano Palace Hotel, in Desenzano not far from Sirmione, and checked in to a lovely place near the lake.  We had a group dinner at La Tavernetta del Pescatore, right on the lake.  We were the only ones in the restaurant, but it was filled!

You can see the lake through the windows behind - these are all our people (plus many more).

Great 3-course meal tonight, featuring lasagna.  We walked back to our hotel, knowing we had an easy day the next morning.  We could actually sleep in!  And rain was expected, making it a more lazy day.  We do have a concert coming up in the evening, though.  Ciao!

By the way, I changed something in Settings for this blog so now you can add comments more easily.  It may show you as ‘Anonymous’ but at least you don’t have to sign into Google, or whatever.  Just put your name at the end so I know who it is.  Thank you!