Let’s talk about food. Not too much, because you know, Italy + Food = it has all been said before. But I thought a brief chat about cheese and pesto and pizza wouldn’t go astray. Oh and wine! Always wine. Red wine, this time, because we were in a sea of Bardolino Classico and Valpolicella, bathing in the stuff.

Pizza and pasta were, of course, abundant, to feed the masses of tourists clamouring for their authentic Italian food. Despite being in a part of Italy not necessarily famous for either. But, hey, it’s Italy, one would be utterly remiss not to eat pizza. Not in any danger of being remiss, we ate plenty of it, awarding our final pizza of the week the highest rating of 9/10. Zucchini, marscapone cheese … I mean. I was too busy eating it to photograph it, which is a good thing.

There was one evening we went off course and had a risotto, purely because the restaurant didn’t serve pizza (SG couldn’t hide his disappointment.) Not that it wasn’t a creamy, peppery delight.

Pizza aside, for a good portion of the week, we did our own thing. After a breakfast of, essentially, a cheese and ham toastie at a cafe on our first morning, we discovered what the hordes of Germans were beelining for every morning – the bakery on the campsite. So we did the same. We beelined every morning and picked up fresh bread and this sensational butter for every breakfast, which we topped with the spoils of our supermarket hunts (I love supermarket hunting in other countries) – cheeses, meats, olives, sun dried tomatoes, sweet treats like Nutella filled pastry cigars, and pesto. I went crazy on the pesto. Two pots in one week. These supermarket hunts also formed the basis for most lunches and a couple of dinners, the only difference being that coffee was replaced with wine. And strawberries were added at one point, because I saw them at a food market and everyone knows you should buy things at food markets in Italy because it feels and sounds great to do so.

There were trip ups and slip ups, namely The Worst Bruschetta in the World which was consumed at a cafe in Verona. Two slices of toasted white bread, a sliced red-green tomato, a sprinkling of dried basil. I still can’t talk about it. An unimpressive sort of sandwich also eaten in Verona, but that was my fault for going off pizza-book. There were olives ordered that came as fries (I mean, not a mistake one can really resent). But you can’t win ’em all and such slips make the triumphs that much sweeter.

As well as our enthusiastic engagement with wine, we really got into the Aperol Spritz groove, surrounded by Aperol Spritz loving Germans and Austrians. SG savoured his Italian beers. We brought back four bottles of wine from the region, oils, and, of course, pesto.

Ah yes, and there was gelato, obviously, shop after shop of tub after tub of soft, colourful gelato that was scooped out and tucked into waffles and cups and attacked by gelato-covered mouths.

The pants are a little tighter this week.

Tomorrow, the final Italy post, phew: Verona

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We stayed in Cisano, a little village in the municipality of Bardolino (think wine, so much glorious wine) somewhere around halfway down the belly of the lake. (Lago di Garda is shaped a bit like a phallus, to be perfectly candid, which is apparently typical of a moraine valley – so belly or balls. I prefer the less gauche ‘belly’.) There isn’t a great deal happening in Cisano itself, save for a little boat pick-up and drop-off point, those occupying the campingplatz and handful of hotels, and a few bars – one with a spectacularly grumpy waiter.

But the spectacularly grumpy waiter was but an easily brushed-aside mosquito when our Aperol Spritzes (German style) came with this:

We spent most of our time in the village of Lazise, also a part of the municipality of Bardolino, because it was the closest village by foot that had the biggest array of restaurants, including what came to be our favourite, Rustico. Plus, the walk to Lazise which we did at least once a day, looks a little something like this:

Lazise teemed with (mostly) German, Austrian and Italian tourists, and there are seemingly three hundred pizzerias to cater to the hordes. The first night we went central but after that, stuck to a side street restaurant that you could slide into without entering the melee in the middle. And the pizza was superb. But even the tourists couldn’t stamp out the quaint beauty of Lazise’s tiny harbour, gelato buildings or old church. Or block the view of that sunset.

Bardolino as a region is famous for producing ruby red, highly drinkable wine, which we quaffed by the litre caraffe. More on that to come. The centre of Bardolino itself is, as most of the lakeside villages are, all stony laneways and colourful restaurants. We found a strange little wine bar away from the hordes of tourists filing through the narrows streets, and listened to an old Italian man with a thinning white bob and several drinks under his belt, entertain whoever happened to pass the bar. After a while he paid his tab and wobbled away on his bicycle and we went in search of lunch.

Coming up tomorrow: Malcesine and Sirmione.

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For as long as I have known him, whenever conversation has drifted to childhood memories, SG has spoken fondly, so fondly, of a big lake in Italy. His Mum and Dad, in true German style, used to drive a caravan down from Kiel, park it by the lake, and set small SG free upon the water, the boats, and the ice cream.

Last Christmas, I got a card in which was the gift of a week down by Lake Garda, staying in a little bungalow in a huge campingplatz (observations about which, and the German camping culture, will get their own blog post) metres from the shore of the fondly remembered lake. Lake Garda to the English, Gardasee to the Germans and, in its mellifluous mother tongue … Lago di Garda.

You’ll find Lago di Garda, the largest lake in Italy and cloistered by mountains from the Gruppo del Bardo, up north, a couple of hours from the Austrian border and a short drive from Verona. It runs for around 51.6km and dotted down its length are ancient villages, olive groves, vineyards, fortifications, and an obscene amount of accommodation options for the tourists. But let’s forget about the tourists for now. Tourists (and there are, to be honest, a lot of them in this pocket of the world) spoil everything.

Without the tourists, Lago di Garda is a beautiful, peaceful collision of the best Mother Nature has to offer – blue water, enormous mountains, bursts of pink and red flowers, thousands of olive trees and the type of climate and ground conducive to producing large quantities of extremely drinkable wine. It is old stony, lane ways and terracotta houses, wrought iron-lace balconies and crumbling forts, pebbly alcoves and long, spindly wooden piers.

The six hour drive down from Weiden bloated into a 9 hour drive from hell, the roads choked with kilometre-long traffic-jams. Every ten minutes, there’d be a tri-lingual sign warning of ‘traffic danger!’ or the sat-nav would give it’s little ‘traffic jam ahead’ signal. A couple of accidents stopped up the roads and gave SG carte blanche to use his word of the trip, ‘rubbernecking.’ Half of Germany and a good portion of the Netherlands, with their huge caravans, banked things up from the Italy-Austria border on, and we crawled our way down through the tolls and into Lake Garda.

But what a drive.

Checking in was chaotic, involved visiting two different reception locations, and seemed to occur alongside the millions of people we shared the roads with. We were both snappy and hungry and sweaty, having been woefully unprepared in the snacks and drinks department of our road trip. In fact, we were generally woefully unprepared compared to the surrounding serious campers, like, for example, our neighbour, who had packed a vacuum cleaner …

The only thing to do, once our little trailer had been located, was to avail ourselves of what Italy does best; food and wine. Nothing like a litre of Bardolino table wine to scrub away the snappiness.

This week will be an Italy week on the blog – words and (plenty of) pictures on the lake’s villages, wine, food, and the beautiful city of Verona. I suggest you consume each post with a glass of red wine and some good cheese.

As for the German camping culture and all I learnt about it … I’ll leave that for next week.

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