9

From a little loft, we can peer over brick-red

rooftops to the ever-changing vista of the lake.

Hotel Fasano, built in the late 19th century on the

lakefront at Gardone Riviera. Negronis arrive with

a pretty selection of spuntini, the obligatory snacks

that have sparked the modern Italian ritual known

as apericena – loosely translated as “dinner when

you’re not having dinner”. Metres away, the lake

slowly changes from deepest navy to a shimmering

moonlit silver. Ferraris and Porsches gleam in the

adjacent car park.

Inside, in the hotel’s gin bar, there are excellent

cocktails and fading photos – American tourists of

the 1920s, German occupiers from the Republic days.

And in Il Fagiano, the hotel’s fine diner, there’s pike,

pigeon and seasonal porcini. “I know this land so well,”

says Matteo Felter, Il Fagiano’s chef and a local boy.

“The lake is an endless source of visual and sensory

inspiration for my cooking. I love the variety of produce

and the small producers you link up with here.”

Felter’s cooking is elegant but strong in flavour

and technique, a showcase for all that the lake

has to offer. He lists the names of its fish – often

underappreciated, he says. To illustrate the point, he

pairs charcoal-grilled eel with local cheeses or Garda

limes, and cooks lake trout at low temperature,

perfuming it with wild herbs. His chocolate-coloured,

burnt-flour tortelli are stuffed with melting bagòss and

rest on a bright pea purée. Dessert has the distinctly

Mediterranean notes of lemon soufflé and limoncello

sorbet, made with Garda lemons.

As our real-estate forays continue, so does our

hunting and gathering. Climbing the steep stone road

to Fasano, just above Gardone where we’re renting

a place, we toy briefly with the idea of renovating an

old hillside house – little more than a pile of stones, but

with 270-degree lake views. It’s here we find Trattoria

Riolet, a convivial eatery with views through olive trees

to the cypress-lined shore below. We start with smoked

lake trout and zucchini antipasto; inside, the chef grills

eggplant and lake fish over coals. On Sundays, we’re

told, they do the regional specialty of spiedo Bresciano,

skewers of mixed meats slow-roasted over fire. We return

for Sunday lunch a few weeks later.

We also find pizza in the hills. At Trattoria Marietta,

above the show-off villas of the Gardone slopes, baker

and pizzaiolo Pietro Freddi makes slow-fermented

dough with unprocessed flours and a sourdough starter,

with seasonal toppings such as local wild radicchio

or mozzarella fresh from the nearby Trompia valley.

We discover one of the area’s many olive presses

at Bornico, on the edge of the Gardone municipality.

The Frantoio del Bornico was built in the 19th century

to harness the force of a rushing mountain stream,

and the powerful rivulet still helps propel the stone

presses. The olives come from about 20 groves across

western Garda, the owner tells me, but the blend

retains its distinct local fruitiness. I return almost

weekly for refills.

Just along the Bornico road at Grasselli vini,

a corner wine shop, the affable proprietor lets his

patrons try before they buy. Rosé, barbera and a light

sparkling white are poured into cleanskin bottles

from spouts in the wall behind his counter. There’s

almost always a gang of jovial drinkers around the

bar tables, whiling away the day as we pass and wave.

We swim from Gardone’s little stony beaches or

from the jetty at the lido for which the restaurant Lido

84 is named, and shop at the weekly market in the town

of Toscolano-Maderno. At its Thursday market in the

sprawling Piazza Caduti di Nassiriya, we get to know

the Calabrian wood-fired bread man, the farmer selling

his fresh Garda goat’s cheese, and work out which

is the best stall for mushrooms. The Alpe del Garda

co-operative also has a stand, for our formagella fix.

Toscolano-Maderno is part apartment-and-resort

sprawl and part historic village. Its back streets reveal

a bakery called Panetteria Perolini, where the specialty

is torta Maderno, a crumbly sponge with a thick

golden thread of baked cream inside, powdered with

a stencil that leaves the image of Maderno’s church

tower in thick white icing sugar.

Toscolano-Maderno becomes our shopping stop.

To grasp the variety of lake fish, we head to Lagomar

• a spectacular fishmonger and rosticceria. Corregone,
  pesce persico, luccio, salmerino and other freshwater
  fish are laid out in iced rows with prawns, clams and
  other sea creatures from the Italian coast and beyond.
  The take-home dishes are great: fried fish, antipasti
  and seafood salads.
  And then there’s Salò. For some the name still
  carries a faint stigma – from the Nazi puppet state
  of the 1940s or even, perhaps, the work of the
  provocative film director and intellectual Pier Paolo
  Pasolini, who set his 1975 version of the Marquis de
  Sade’s120 Days of Sodomhere, ostensibly during the
  Hitler-Mussolini era.
  And yet Salò is the most benign, indeed elegant of
  the west Garda towns. It sits in the curve of a small cove,
  with a manicured promenade running the full length,
  hemmed in by Monte San Bartolomeo and there’s a
  pebble beach just beyond the town limits. Salò is where
  locals get their Italian luxury labels and tourists buy
  smartly packaged Garda souvenirs. Spirito del Garda
  is an attractive shop full of top-drawer olive oils, jam
  made from local fruit, sweet-smelling Garda lemon soaps
  and my favourite: powdered capers from an organic
  producer, perfect with barbecued or roasted fish.➤

GOURMET TRAVELLER 85