The Lake Garda Riviera Discovery Guide

The obvious answer is the combination: a large, clean, swimmable lake with mountains at one end and a Renaissance fortress town at the other, an hour and a half from Venice.

The Scaliger castle chain is the historical spine -- Malcesine, Torri del Benaco and Lazise all keep the fortresses Verona's lords built to control the water, and Malcesine's stands on a rock directly above it.

Monte Baldo is the surprise. A rotating cable car climbs from Malcesine to 1,760 metres in ten minutes, and the mountain is known to botanists as the garden of Europe -- it escaped the worst of the glaciations, so it kept plants that were wiped out elsewhere.

Peschiera del Garda is a UNESCO World Heritage site, part of the inscription covering Venice's defensive works, and its pentagonal fortress is still legible from the water.

And the wind: Garda's daily thermal cycle is so reliable that the lake is one of the world's great sailing and windsurfing waters.

If you travel slowly: a week, based in one town, using the ferries. The lake is best understood from the water, and the boat network makes a car unnecessary.

If you want the essentials: Malcesine and the Monte Baldo cable car, then the ferry south to Torri del Benaco. A full day.

If you're after local character: the olive mills and the small wine producers behind Bardolino, and the fishermen's harbours at Torri and Garda early in the morning.

If you're travelling with children: the southern end -- Gardaland, Lazise's walled harbour, and the shallow, warm water at Peschiera.

If you want to go past the obvious: walk on Monte Baldo. Take the cable car up and come down on foot through the botanical zones, or ride the ridge; the mountain is a different world from the shore two thousand metres below it.

The Veneto shore takes a very heavy summer load -- German, Austrian and Italian holidaymakers, concentrated between June and August on a strip a few hundred metres wide.

May, June and September are materially better for the shore and for the visitor. The water is warm enough from June, and the towns are functioning rather than saturated.

The olive terraces above the towns are the shore's defining landscape and the most economically marginal part of it. Buying Garda DOP oil from a local frantoio rather than a supermarket is the most direct support they get.

The lake itself is under pressure: water levels have fallen sharply in recent drought years, and the lake supplies irrigation for a large part of the Po plain as well as drinking water. Its condition is not a given.

Monte Baldo is a protected botanical area with rare endemics. Keep to paths, and do not pick anything -- some of what grows there grows nowhere else.

Arriving by train to Peschiera and using the lake ferries rather than driving the shore road removes a car from a road that is genuinely overloaded in July and August.

May and June are the best months: the shore is green, the olive and citrus terraces are in leaf, the water is warming, and the crowds have not arrived.

September is the other good one -- the lake is at its warmest, the vendemmia is on in Bardolino, and the towns are quieter.

July and August are the peak in earnest, with German and Austrian school holidays on top of the Italian ones. The shore road queues, parking is difficult, and prices are at their highest.

April and October are pleasant and cheap, with everything open but the water too cold for most swimmers.

Winter is quiet and mild by northern Italian standards; many hotels close, but the towns stay inhabited and Monte Baldo turns into a small ski area.

What a visitor actually spends on the Veneto shore of Lake Garda