How Was The Lake Garda Riviera Built

The shore's older settlements are harbour towns: a walled basin, a quay, a compact grid of narrow streets behind it, and a castle at one end. Lazise, Torri del Benaco and Malcesine all follow the pattern.

The Scaliger castles are the defining structures -- fourteenth-century, in pale stone with the swallowtail merlons of the imperial party, and sited to command a harbour rather than a hilltop.

Peschiera is a different order of thing: a pentagonal fortress begun by Venice in the sixteenth century and rebuilt by the Austrians, with bastions, water ditches fed from the Mincio and a town entirely inside the walls.

Above the towns, the slopes are terraced in dry stone for olives -- generations of wall-building that is the real architecture of the shore.

The limonaie, tall rectangular frames of stone pillars that were roofed and glazed each winter to shelter lemon trees, are the strangest surviving structures; one at Torri del Benaco still works.

Everything else is post-1960s hotel and campsite building, dense along the water and largely unremarkable.