City of Verona and Lavagnone

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. City of Verona

   Verona is where the north of Italy starts to feel like the south, and where history piles up in layers so thick that you trip over them. The Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, still dominates Piazza Bra and still hosts opera in summer, with tens of thousands of people sitting on stone steps two thousand years old. The Adige river swings through town in a double bend, crossed by bridges including the Ponte Pietra, part Roman and rebuilt after the Germans blew it up in 1945. And of course there is Juliet's balcony, which was added to a medieval house in the twentieth century to satisfy visitors searching for the Shakespeare story; people queue to rub the breast of her bronze statue for luck.

   Read the complete City of Verona write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   City of Verona is where the day begins. Next is Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda.

2. 2. Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda

   Water surrounds Peschiera on every side, and that was the whole idea. The town sits where the River Mincio flows out of the southern end of Lake Garda, and in the sixteenth century the Republic of Venice turned it into a star-shaped fortress with massive pentagonal walls, bastions and moats fed by the lake and the river. Later the Austrians made it one of the four corners of the Quadrilatero, the defensive square of fortresses that guarded their hold on northern Italy in the nineteenth century. In 2017 Peschiera became part of the UNESCO listing of Venetian works of defence between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alongside Bergamo, Palmanova and fortresses on the Adriatic.

   Read the complete Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda comes up about 29 km into the recorded legs. Next is Lavagnone.

3. 3. Lavagnone

   Lavagnone does not look like much, and that is rather the point. South of Lake Garda, behind Desenzano, the landscape is a rumple of low hills left by the glacier that once filled the lake basin, and in a hollow among them lies a small peat basin that was once a shallow lake. Around four thousand years ago, in the Bronze Age, people built houses on timber piles at its edge, and when the water level fell and the peat built up, the wood was preserved in the mud like a time capsule.

   Read the complete Lavagnone write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 46 km into the recorded legs you reach Lavagnone. Next is back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda.

4. 4. back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda, late in the day. Next is City of Verona.

5. 5. City of Verona

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete City of Verona write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at City of Verona. That is the ride.