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Garda is the largest and the most comfortable of the Italian Lakes. It’s less mysterious than some, but also more dependable. You might dally with Orta, or lose your head over a little flirt like Iseo - but Garda is the lake you come home to.

These days, though, it’s a home shared with thousands of others. Hordes of German and Austrian tourists - many just in for the day - are greeted by shops selling Lederwaren and hotels announcing that they have the odd Zimmer frei. These visitors from the north are following a trail blazed by Goethe, who came south in 1786 to see with his own eyes the Italy of Virgil and Catullus - but who was also drawn by the scent of lemons and the taste of figs. “What I enjoy most of all is the fruit”, he wrote in his journal. “The figs and pears are delicious, and no wonder, since they ripen in a region where lemon trees are growing”.

Its balmy climate is Garda’s big selling-point. The lake acts as a gigantic solar panel, and a ring of mountains retains the heat. Not unlike Como and Maggiore, in fact - but Garda is less prey to nighttime swings of temperature, as there is a buffer of 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 southerly ora - keep things bearable. Depending on direction and time of day, these winds can change character and name, like Lewis Carroll’s Snark: the sover may mutate into a dangerous gale-force balinot, while the insidious vent da mût sneaks in from the west. Whatever wind is blowing, a colourful flutter of winsdurfers can usually be seen skimming over the water, making the most of it.

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 that wags a crooked finger from the southern shore of Garda. The so-called Grotte di Catullo - a huge Roman villa on Sirmione’s northern tip - may not really have belonged to Catullus, but the entrepreneur who put it up in the 1st century AD could well have used the bard’s verses in praise of Benaco (the Latin name for Garda) in his advertisements for this “uniquely situated timeshare property complete with thermal baths and shady cryptoporticus”. These days, of course, Sirmione is utterly given up to tourism of a more hit-and-run variety - but that doesn’t lessen its powers of seduction. The thirteenth-century Rocca Scaligera, with its 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 - pick of the crop being the sumptuous Villa Cortine. There is also a huge, old-style thermal establishment patronised (one hopes) by rheumatic generals in bath-chairs, which channels the hot sulphurous water from a spring that gurgles from the bottom of the lake a few hundred metres offshore.

The other towns on the southern shore, Desenzano to the west and Peschiera to the east, have a certain bustling sense of style, but are far from being essential stop-overs, still less good bases for a holiday. Like most of this southern drag, they are too close to Milan and Verona. Of a weekend the roads are jammed with BMWs, the air thick with mobile phone waves. This southern stretch is also prey to a messy sprawl of light industry and - especially around Desenzano - mega-discotheques. Of course, mega-discotheques may be your thing - in which case Friday night at the Nuovo Genux in nearby Lonato, with its syncopated fountains, is not to be missed.

Between Desenzano and Sirmione is the hilly wine-growing region of Valtenesi, dotted with tiny villages, almost every one of which appears to have its very own Medieval rocca, or castle. The main road passes inland at this point, which means that this section of lakeshore is relatively unspoilt, dotted with little ports like Dusano, just below the village of Manerba. There is nothing here but a couple of bars, a tiny marina, a jetty for the lake ferry, a couple of swans sailing by, and a ticket seller taking a nap in the sun.

Punta Portese and the tantalisingly private Isola del Garda end the southern sweep of the Gulf of Salò and mark the start of the Western Riviera, Garda’s small-scale version of the Côte d’Azur. This palm-fringed chapter in the history of tourism centres on the towns of Salò, which embraces the head of the gulf, and Gardone Riviera, strung out along the shore to the north. Salò has the bustling life of a prosperous town, the boats and the cafes, the entwined lovers on lakeside benches, the twisting backstreets with their bijoux shops. The town’s sinister associations - it was the capital of Mussolini’s puppet government of Salò after the rout of September 1943, famous for doing nothing much except busing 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 (Liberty in Italian) which is nowhere more in evidence than in the friezed and fronded dining room of the Hotel Laurin.

Gardone Riviera, the other centre of the Riviera, has no real focal point: 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 monopolised by a series of hotels - the Grand Hotel, the Villa Fiordalisa, the Grand Hotel Fasano and Villa Principe - which make the most of their frontage, and take one back to the days of high tea and starched collars.

In its palm court glory days, European royalty and heads of state piled into Gardone; intellectuals like Friedrich Nietzsche came to ponder the problem of why nihilist supermen always seem to get the best hotels; and the warmongering Italian aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio took an Art Nouveau villa and its surrounding park and turned it into a monument to himself. The Vittoriale is like a decadent Disneyland, the twisted creation of a proto-fascist with a taste for silk dressing-gowns. There is a house (the Schifamondo) where the poet lived behind coloured panes of glass with his cigar cases and a stuffed giant tortoise for company. There is a mausoleum that looks like one of the attachments on a blender, its heroic sun-god posturings rather deflated by the political and military fiasco - the occupation of Fiume in 1919 - that it celebrates; and there is a battleship wedged into the hillside, among the cypresses. At our backs we hear the ghost of Gabriele piping “I did it! See? I got a battleship up here!”

Toscolano-Maderno, north of Gardone, is of note mainly as the site of the huge Cartiera di Toscolano paper works - Garda’s largest single employer - and as the embarkation point for the car ferry to Torri del Benaco on the eastern shore. Gargnano is a small but perfectly-formed port town, with a bevvy of yachts bobbing behind a promenade of orange trees, and one of the lake’s best restaurants, La Tortuga. Beyond here the mountains close in, and the Gardesana lakeside road begins to thread its way through a succession of tunnels. Eventually we see the light at Limone, which should really be called “Oliva” these days, as Garda’s most famous crop survives only in a few groves down by the roadside; the terraces above rustle and teem with olives. Limone is one of the few towns on Garda that has been substantially ruined by tourism - or that has taken such a heavy knock that it’s struggling to recover. The narrow main street is a souk lined with anything people might be prepared to spend their hard-earned deutschmarks, pounds, dollars or (just occasionally) lire on. Only in the steep, verdant terraces above, where the only hard sell is the excellent olive oil pressed and bottled by the local cooperative, is there any respite.

Lake Garda is carved up between three Italian regions - Lombardy, Trentino and the Veneto. While this may not mean much to most visitors, the divisions are as much historical as administrative, and have left their mark on the look and feel of the lakeside towns. Riva del Garda, the main resort of the northern shore, belongs to Trentino. It was part of Austria between 1797 and 1918, and became a miniature Lido - the lakeside playground of an empire which craved the warm south. Viewed through the other end of the telescope, though, Riva is liable to feel oddly northern; with its tall, solid buildings, the Sacher torte squatting immorally in the windows of its pasticcerie and with the faint whiff of wood smoke in the air, it’s easy to imagine well-padded Viennese burghers and burgheresses taking their morning constitutionals by the lake.

Torbole is a pretty town with an unimpeded view on clear days down through the whole lake to Desenzano, and a clear run for winsurfers too, who have elected the town as their main Garda base. It was Goethe’s base too, for a few days in 1786. He would no doubt have enjoyed the postcard on sale outside the tabaccheria which lures visitors with the seductive slogan: “Torbole: bikers and free climbing”. Convoys of bikers, it must be said, are a fixed feature of the Garda scene. This must be one of the few places in the world - outside of Fellini’s 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 over two thousand metres 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 explore it is by taking the cable car from Malcesine, 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 a pretty Scaliger castle; pebble-cobbled lanes lead down to a tiny lakeside frontage. The only problem is that most of the hotels sprawl along the busy Gardesana road to the north and south, making Malcesine more of a day trip destination than an ideal base. The best way to approach it is by water from Garda, Riva or Salò, on one of those curious triple-decker ferries that looks like a cross between a Mississippi steamer and the Wolverhampton DHSS office.

Beyond castle-crowned Torri del Benaco, the mountains subside into a series of rolling, vine-covered hills, dedicated to the Bacchic cult of Bardolino and Soave. Garda, the main town of the Veronese third of the lake, is an attractive, faintly old-fashioned resort, where the Daily Mail and the Suddeutschischer Zeitung vie for supremacy at the newsstands. Bardolino beyond has two pretty churches, San Zeno and San Severo, a well-preserved Medieval centre and a name which rather gives the game away - to sample the most famous local product, head for the Cantina Zeni in the hills above, where a collection of wine-making implements (the “Museo del Vino”) is a prelude to the serious business of wine-tasting. The town’s tourist board even promotes a restorative “grape diet” which begins: “Breakfast: half a kilo of grapes. 10am: grape juice...” Between Bardolino and Peschiera is the Gardaland amusement park, the largest in Italy, where fantastic hours will fly by in an adventure and fantasy land (to quote the brochure). Or whose death-defying rides and acres of historical pastiche, glimpsed fleetingly from the road, will remind us of why we didn’t book a holiday in Orlando, Florida (not to quote the brochure).

For one of the lake’s most perfect historical settings - without a hint of pastiche - backtrack from Garda to the Punta di San Vigilio headland. Here, at the end of a cypress-lined track, is the harmonious Villa Guarienti, designed by Sammicheli in the 16th century. To the left, down a cobbled lane, is the best place to stay on this or, for that matter, any other lake: the Locanda San Vigilio, which overlooks a tiny harbour. Here too is a 17th century limonaia, one of very few on Garda to have preserved the arrangement of high columns and removable slats that allowed the lemon trees to be protected from the frosts in winter, when fires were lit inside the roofed-over orchard. The Baia delle Sirene park is also part of the estate: a curving beach below an olive grove, with showers and a children’s play area - one of Garda’s most feasible beaches, which makes the most of the fact that here, for once, the lakeside road is forced to veer inland. The opposite of “kiss me quick”: that’s San Vigilio.
This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)

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