18-Jun-2018:: Exploring Lake Garda Day 1

This morning we set off after breakfast at the hotel, to visit the villa known as the Vittoriale Degli Italiano (which translates to The Victory of the Italians). It is a house and garden complex located on the western shores of Lake Garda at a place called Gardone Riviera. The house and garden complex is famous for Italians in that it was completely refurbished and adorned by a man called Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was an important figure in Italian politics and society in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He was prominent as a poet, a social thinker, an intellectual and a political commentator in that era. He was also a ‘friend’ of Mussolini, but they kept a respectful distance from each other. Mussolini recognised the political capability of D’Annunzio and therefore put steps in place to isolate him as much as possible. He eventually succeeded in doing this by funding D’Annunzio’s eccentric and ambitious plans to build a house according to his weird strange outlandish and freakish imagination. To keep him quiet, Mussolini basically gave him free rein to spend public money in whatever way D’Annunzio wanted. This resulted in a wacky weird house cluttered with adornments of all shapes and sizes from many different parts of the world and his fear of death enabled to surround himself with various artifacts of all religions. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that he used the public purse to fulfill his own creative ambitions and in doing so created his own legacy. Rightfully so, when he died, the house became public property.

From Gardone, we drove to Maderna, where we took the ferry across to Torri and drove to Spiazzi, a lovely little alpine village, where we had lunch. From there we also visited the amazing Madonna Della Corona sanctuary, a simply astounding construction of a church built literally into the side of a rock cliff. How this was achieved I cannot say, but suffice to say that it is amazing to view this church just clinging to the side of a cliff.
We were supposedly close to the top of Monte Baldo, a high peak in the area which provides great views over the valleys, mountains and back to Lake Garda, so the adventurous spirit took over and up we went. The highlight of this journey was not the views unfortunately, as the atmosphere up there was slightly cloudy foggy and hazy which limited visibility, but the drive up these skinny,windy mountain roads, barely wide enough for one vehicle. What made matters even more interesting was that there must have been some sort of Alfa car club rally going on, so a number of Alfa drivers came zipping around corners, hairpin bends and tight curves whilst we’re trying to wind our way up the mountain. Certainly made for a challenging drive!

The drive back down to Sirmione was less eventful; we reached our Hotel Riel after 5:00pm. We had a dinner engagement with our great friends Bruno, Maria and their daughter Mel, who also happened to be traveling northern Italy and by chance our paths crossed on this day. We had a fabulous evening with them and swapped some interesting travel stories.