Just outside Peschiera del Garda, at the southern tip of the lake, the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Frassino stands among vineyards and fields. According to legend, in 1510 a farmer working in his vineyard was threatened by a snake, prayed to the Virgin and found a small statue of the Madonna in the branches of an ash tree, frassino in Italian. The snake disappeared, and the sanctuary was built on the spot. Today it is a Franciscan church and convent, with a cloister and a collection of votive offerings left by the grateful over the centuries.
Peschiera itself is a fortress town, surrounded by water. The Venetians built a star-shaped fortress around it in the sixteenth century, with walls rising from the lake and the Mincio river, and the town is part of the UNESCO listing of Venetian Works of Defence, alongside Bergamo and Palmanova. Later, it formed part of the Austrian Quadrilateral, a system of four fortresses defending the Habsburg possessions in northern Italy.
The area also has much older history. The lakeshore was home to prehistoric pile dwellings, and the site of Lucone, in the hills to the west, belongs to the UNESCO-listed Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps. South of the lake, the morainic hills left by the glacier that carved Lake Garda roll towards the plain, and among them, near Solferino and San Martino, the bloody battle of 1859 between the Franco-Piedmontese and Austrian armies was fought. The suffering of the wounded so shocked the Swiss businessman Henry Dunant that he wrote a book about it, which led to the founding of the Red Cross. There is a museum, an ossuary chapel and a monument at Solferino.
The riding around the lake is busy in summer, with heavy tourist traffic on the shore roads, but the hills to the south offer quieter roads through vineyards producing Lugana, a white wine, and the Custoza wines on the Veronese side. The Mincio valley, running south to Mantua, has a cycle path and gentle roads through fields and villages like Borghetto, with its old mills.
Peschiera has fuel, cafés and restaurants. Come in spring or autumn, when the lake is calm and the roads are emptier. In July and August, the shore roads around Garda are a traffic jam.