Venice and Lake Garda

A friend was getting married in Venice in late June and we turned it into a week. Four nights in Venice, then we rented a car and drove to Sirmione on Lake Garda for another four. The wedding was the reason for the trip. Italy was the reason for everything else.

We stayed at Eight Venezia in Dorsoduro, which is the quieter, more residential side of Venice across the Grand Canal from San Marco. Dorsoduro is where the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are, and where the streets thin out enough that you can actually walk without being in a crowd. The hotel is small, modern, tucked into a building that doesn't announce itself from the outside. Inside it's clean and well-designed with rooms that face either a canal or a courtyard. Ours had a canal view and the sound of water moving against stone at night is something that Venice does better than anywhere.

Venice in late June is hot and full of people, but if you get up early the city is yours. We'd leave the hotel by 7 AM most mornings, before the tour groups assembled, and walk. That's the thing about Venice that's hard to explain until you're there: it's a walking city in a way that no other city is, because there are no cars. No bikes. No scooters weaving through traffic. Just people and water and bridges and the sound of your own shoes on stone. You get lost constantly. The streets dead-end at canals, loop back on themselves, send you through someone's courtyard. Getting lost is not a failure in Venice. It's the whole experience.

The wedding was on a Saturday at a venue on one of the smaller islands. Beautiful ceremony, reception that ran late into the night, a boat back to the main island at 1 AM when the Grand Canal was empty and lit only by the buildings along the water. That boat ride, slightly drunk, suit jacket off, G leaning against me with her shoes in her hand, the city sliding past us in the dark, is one of those moments I'll remember longer than the ceremony itself.

G has cousins in the area and we saw them for an afternoon. Coffee, catching up, the kind of visit where you sit at a table outside somewhere and two hours disappear into conversation. They showed us a bacaro (a Venetian wine bar) near the Rialto that wasn't in any guidebook, standing room only, tiny glasses of wine and cicchetti (small bites) on the counter. The crostini with baccala mantecato (creamed salt cod) was the one I kept going back for. We stood there for about an hour, ate too much, and said goodbye. Family visits on vacation have their own rhythm. You don't need to do everything. You just need to show up.

For food beyond the bacaro, Venice is tricky. The tourist restaurants near San Marco are mostly bad. Overpriced pasta, frozen seafood, waiters who don't care because the customers won't be back tomorrow. The good food is in the neighborhoods where locals actually eat. Osteria alle Testiere in Castello is a tiny seafood restaurant with about nine tables and a menu that changes based on what came off the boats that morning. Reservations are essential and they only do two seatings per night. The raw fish plate and the spaghetti with clams were both excellent. We also stumbled into a place near Campo Santa Margherita one night whose name I never caught. Handwritten menu on a chalkboard, paper tablecloths, a carafe of house white that cost about four euros. G had the cuttlefish ink risotto and it turned her teeth black and she didn't care. That's when a meal is good enough to override vanity.

After four days, we picked up a rental car near Piazzale Roma (the only part of Venice where cars exist, at the very edge of the island) and drove to Sirmione, a small town on a peninsula that juts into the southern end of Lake Garda. The drive is about two hours through flat Veneto countryside, past Verona, and then suddenly you're at the edge of a lake that looks like it belongs in a different country. Lake Garda is enormous. The southern end is wide and warm and the water is clean enough to swim in. The northern end narrows into the mountains and starts looking like Switzerland.

Sirmione is built on a peninsula so narrow that you can see water on both sides from certain streets. The entrance to the old town is through a castle, the Scaligero Castle, with a drawbridge and a moat and towers that look like a medieval postcard. The old town inside is small enough to walk in 20 minutes. Cobblestone streets, gelato shops, restaurants overlooking the water.

We didn't do much in Sirmione and that was the point. Swam in the lake every morning. Read books in the afternoon. Ate dinner at outdoor restaurants where the lake was the view and the fish was pulled from it that day. One night we walked to the end of the peninsula to the Roman ruins of the Grotte di Catullo, the remains of a Roman villa from the 1st century BC that sits at the very tip of the land, olive trees growing between the crumbling walls, the lake stretching out in every direction. We got there just before sunset and had the ruins mostly to ourselves. G sat on a stone wall and looked out at the water and said nothing for about ten minutes, which is her version of a five-star review.

We drove back to Venice for the flight home. A week in Italy. A wedding, a car, a lake, and enough crostini to last me until the next trip.