City of Verona and Lugana Vecchia

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 Lucone.

4. 4. Lucone

   Lucone is a small basin in the green hills of the Valtènesi, just west of Lake Garda, and it is one of the sites in the UNESCO listing of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps. Once there was a little lake here, and during the Bronze Age people built villages of wooden houses raised on piles along its shore. The lake later turned to marsh and peat, which preserved the timbers, pottery and organic remains in waterlogged conditions for thousands of years. What you see today is a gentle, wooded hollow among vineyards and fields, and you need some imagination; the finds are in the archaeological museum in nearby Gavardo.

   Read the complete Lucone write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Lucone, about halfway. Next is Lugana Vecchia.

5. 5. Lugana Vecchia

   Lake Garda's southern shore is a landscape made by ice. At the end of the last glaciation a huge tongue of ice pushed out of the Alps and left behind a ring of moraine hills, curved like an amphitheatre, with the lake in the middle and the Po plain beyond. The shallow bay near Sirmione, where the lake meets the low land, was settled very early, and Lugana Vecchia is one of the prehistoric pile-dwelling sites around the Alps that UNESCO has grouped together as a World Heritage Site. Villages of timber houses on stilts stood in the shallows or on the shore here in the Bronze Age, and the wet ground preserved wood, textiles and tools that would have rotted elsewhere.

   Read the complete Lugana Vecchia write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Lugana Vecchia sits at 84 km, about halfway. Next is back through Lucone.

6. 6. back through Lucone

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Lucone write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   back through Lucone comes up about 116 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Lavagnone.

7. 7. back through Lavagnone

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

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

8. 8. 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.

9. 9. 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

   The route ends here after 184 km.