CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Desenzano del Garda it runs 88 km to Desenzano del Garda; allow about 1 h 48 of riding. It goes by way of Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda, Villa Serego and back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda. The line favours views over speed.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 29 km this is Mille Miglia Historic Route Core, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lavagnone is where the day begins. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda comes up about 17 km into the recorded legs. Next is Villa Serego.
Andrea Palladio built many villas around the Veneto, but the one at Santa Sofia di Pedemonte, in the Valpolicella just north-west of Verona, is the oddball of the family. Commissioned by Marcantonio Serego in the mid-sixteenth century and never finished, it has none of the smooth classical calm of the Rotonda. Instead its courtyard is lined with giant Ionic columns built up from rough, rusticated blocks of local stone, as if the building were half turning back into the hillside. Only part of the planned design was completed, and the effect is wonderfully strange.
Read the complete Villa Serego write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 46 km into the recorded legs you reach Villa Serego. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda, late in the day. Next is Lavagnone.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Lavagnone write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Lavagnone. That is the ride.
Lavagnone → Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda → Villa Serego is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Villa Serego → back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Fortified city of Peschiera del Garda → Lavagnone is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.