Villa Serego and Lavagnone

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. 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.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Villa Serego 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 25 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 42 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 Villa Serego.

5. 5. Villa Serego

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Villa Serego write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Back at Villa Serego. That is the ride.