Riva del Garda, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy
We're not far from Lake Garda
so we decided to visit today. I spotted some interesting buildings on the way,
including a castle which sported banners in large letters saying "THIS IS
NOT A CASTLE"
! Higher on the hill though, was a building
which WAS a castle, but a ruined one. There was also an impressive one en route
at Arco, perched high on a rock at the entrance to the town.
We
headed for Riva del Garda and our first priority was to find a hardware store
so R could buy some aluminium tape - Google gave us a location for one....and
they were closed for lunch. We had a quick look at the
town, the famous lake resort but quickly lost interest as it was very busy and
very touristy, so headed north to see a waterfall I'd read about.
The Varonne Cascade was
definitely worth the trip - a huge waterfall which looks as though its in a cave but is actually in a very narrow gorge. You
can view it from 2 levels - the upper one is the most impressive and definitely
the most wet. We'd been warned to take a waterproof and boy, was it necessary -
I've never been as wet in spray since the Maid of the Mist boat at Niagara
Falls! Very impressive too, although I did think the photos were a little
spoiled with the coloured lighting they used.
To get there we walked through some beautiful botanical gardens,
with colourful flowers and impressive plants. The path weaved up and round,
bordered with the plants & producing great views towards lake Garda. There
was also a Zen garden with swirls in gravel, plain stones and minimal planting.....
I really liked it but R couldn't see the point. Heathen!!
The lower level of the gorge was slightly less wet, but still
very impressive as you could look up at the long drop of the fall. The cleft in
the rock containing the fall was so narrow that it almost looked man-made – but
the water falling all around us certainly wasn’t. Very wetting.
Back to the aluminium tape: we returned to the now open hardware
store only to find it was for tradesmen only, but they did give us directions
to another which WOULD sell it to us. We found it, queued for nearly 10 mins
along with irate Italian men and eventually emerged victorious with the tape.
We took a ride down the eastern
side of L Garda as its supposed to be very beautiful - well it might be, but
there was so much fog coming off it that we could barely see the other side.
The road clings to the shoreline & the mountains rise almost straight up,
so when we missed a turning it took us nearly 5 miles to be able to turn round.
R reckons I'm fixated on twisty mountain roads so I obliged him with a trip up to 4000ft, accessed of course by many, many hairpins.
It was very pretty though, with tiny villages sort of spilling down
near-vertical slopes, trees & rocks everywhere & complete quiet when we
stopped to admire the views. We also spotted a golf course way up there, bizarrely with a ski lift going straight up one fairway.
We've decided to move on tomorrow as we need to start heading
north without doing continuous days' driving. Its a shame as we'd liked to have
stayed here for longer, but needs must.
2025-05-22