All the lying ecology of Lake Garda revealed

17 August 2024

Garda est omnis divisus in partes tres. Just like Caesar's Gaul, Italy's largest lake is one and three: divided between Veneto, Lombardy and Trentino, with a very varied landscape, ranging from hilly in the south to mountainous in the north, as a whole it attracts so many tourists that it beats entire regions. With 25 million admissions in 2023, Garda far exceeds Puglia (16.8 million), Campania (20.1) and Sicily (16.8). The newspapers talk little about it. It is not frequented by celebrities, it is ignored by the summer chronicles, which rattle off VIPs with Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg's competitions to see who can show off the longest yacht sailing between Capri and the Costiera, and list the frequenters of Forte dei Marmi, Portofino, Salento, with a few sprinklings of Cortina. Just this week, Valeriya Safronova told the New York Times how to enjoy the beauty of Lake Como ‘without being a Hollywood king or a billionaire’. For Americans, that lake ‘conjures up images of blue water, opulent villas and villages where celebrities like Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Amal and George Clooney try to dodge the paparazzi’.

On Lake Garda, just to make a disarming comparison, Diletta Leotta seems to have spent a few weekends with Loris Karius, and long gone are the days when the munificent Silvio Berlusconi used to send his collaborators to lose weight at Villa Paradiso in Gardone Riviera. You will remember the photograph of his former dauphin, Giovanni Toti, looking out in white overalls from a small balcony of the ‘maison du relax’ together with his employer. Toti has over time become even more pudgy, probably by now resigned to a not-so-slim fate. These belly melting sojourns are almost never lasting successes. Back to Garda. Three regions and three types of tourism that unite local visitors, also hit-and-run (so-called ‘proximity tourism’), with a mass of tourists of increasingly varied and remote nationalities, who overlap with the hard core of Germans, attracted for more than two centuries by the words of the most famous and persuasive influencer who ever visited the lake, Wolfgang Goethe. In the ‘Wilhelm Meister’, the poet makes the nostalgic Mignon say: ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluehn’ (Do you know the land where the lemons blossom?), and that land is Garda, which the poet had also described in his travel diary in Italy.

This verse, quoted by all the tourist companies on the lake, hotel websites, and inscriptions on ancient portals, the people of Lake Garda learned it as children in the original language. And in short, ever since then down Germans, from Heinrich Heine to Franz Kafka to Thomas Mann, to ingloriously with the Social Republic to the ruthless occupiers of the Wehrmacht. I remember that during my summers on Lake Garda, when I was a teenager, we still used to welcome German tourists who were useful for turnover by suspecting them of Nazi backgrounds. With our parents and grandparents pointing out certain beer-bellied, possibly mutilated Krauts as suspected fake tourists on the hunt for bunkers where they had hidden loot from raids, in a landscape that had meanwhile been profusely altered.

In short, as for VIPs, there is much glorious or inglorious past, from André Gide to D'Annunzio, from Mussolini to Callas, but the present is far more anonymous. On the Veneto and Lombardy shores there are classic holidays, the dinghy, the jet ski, the pedalo, day trips to Brescia, Milan, Verona and Venice, or to the Vittoriale in Gardone, and then the eating, drinking, shopping and nightlife. On the Veronese shore there is the phenomenal attraction of Gardaland, the generator of colossal traffic jams, a nightmare/trap in which sooner or later all the parents, or the couples of childish adults, end up. Finally, the smallest portion, the northern tip, a windswept bottleneck, the Trentino Garda. The area, also known as ‘la busa’ (the hole), is famous for being a sporting enclave, a kind of stadium where sailing enthusiasts toil from mornings to evenings gliding and fluttering on every kind of board or barge, a test bed for every innovation in materials and shapes. And then they climb in the rock gyms, and pedal on the endless cycle paths. As many as 1,600 kilometres of dedicated bike and mountain bike trails.

With four million admissions in this small portion of lake and hinterland alone, far more than in Versilia, Trentino Garda is the realm of a Europe that is the bearer of many contemporary values: sport, sport and more sport, recycling of rubbish, care not to litter, environmentalism, coolness of the sports equipment and even of the bins (the most beautiful ever seen, masterpieces of design), healthy food, all in a persistent Central European flavour. Motor boating is forbidden, with the exception of the Navigarda boats and rescue dinghies that go out to catch beginners who fail to return to base with windsurfing, windfoil, wingfoil, kitesurfing. Riva del Garda, Torbole and Arco grind out visitors in a continuous stream with a very long tourist season (from March to the end of October), under the banner of the ‘stay young’ holiday, as Silvio Rigatti, president of the Nago-Torbole Tourist Board, calls it. ‘Here in Trentino we had these great visions already 40 years ago, we took the engines out of the lake and multiplied the cycle paths, which are constantly increasing. The Garda Rangers, employees of the tourism company, maintain paths and fences and signposts. The region does all it can to increase alternative mobility'.

Torbole in particular is a kind of Italian Santa Cruz, where a youth with sculpted muscles, moderately tattooed, accompanied by prodigy children, already acrobatic from an early age, wander around the town and at the agreed times, those of the Peler wind in the early morning and the Ora wind in the early afternoon, they jump into the water and paint the blue of the lake with the colours of hundreds of small sails or wings, with spectacular jumps and acrobatics permitted by the foils, commented on by the Uhhh! and Ahhh! of the spectators at the edge of the lake. In the dead of night, they lie dormant waiting for the wind to return, ready to rearm their equipment. Or they pedal vigorously up deadly climbs to reach peaks like Punta Larici, at 907 metres, from which there are amazing views of the lake basin dotted with sails. We met groups of Australians from Perth, who have identified this corner of Lake Garda as the kingdom of ideal wind, and many Sikhs from the Brescia plain, who swim at the mouth of the Sarca, the lake's main tributary (and unfortunately one drowned a few days ago). They seem to have discovered Riva and the Varone waterfalls thanks to their influencers, and now arrive in droves on days off from work in the stables and fields.

Then, more and more Poles, Czechs, Swedes, Dutch, Americans, New Zealanders and even Arabs, but not sportsmen. Two hundred days of regattas a year, countless sailing clubs, the Youth Sailing World Cup just finished, thirty-five years ago the first Bike Festival in Riva, Europe's largest bicycle fair, which prompted the transformation of the area into a dense network of cycle paths, with signs and fences and public pumps for bicycles and posters explaining the biotypes, while there are also climbers and climbers who arrive in droves for certain crags that can only be found in Arco, where the Rock Festival is celebrated every year. 

The myth of the performance holiday finds its Eldorado in this area. The lawns at the edge of the lake, the small beaches as expanses of technical equipment, sails, supports, wetsuits, helmets, booms, hooks, trolleys, neoprene bags for boards, screwdrivers, interspersed with people lying down to rest or to assemble parts, family dogs and babies still only a few months away from the pursuit of sporting performance. The Duotone Pro Center in Torbole is one of the world's most exclusive schools for windsurfing and its variants, where champions are trained, new materials are tested, and the wind waits while listening to reggae, unplugged, west coast, funk rock music. Chiara Lolli, the beautiful owner with the big lake-coloured eyes, arrived in Torbole twenty years ago, with her multi-sports enthusiastic partner. They came from Reggio Emilia, which she does not miss. 'Trentino people love their land and are quite sporty. There is an exceptional quality of life here,' she tells us. ‘It used to be a place of fishermen, then in the 1970s with windsurfing came the boom in sports tourism, which replaced the bohemian German intellectuals of the early 1900s. Finally, kitesurfing and, above all, foil gave a further boost'. Meanwhile, she and her partner, who also run two clothing and sailing equipment stores, have raised a son who was European under-13 windsurfing champion. While one of the best performers is a gentleman with a large sail branded ‘Nonno’. He appears to be an 80-year-old man from Bologna, and in fact one can also see a lot of canine men twirling and zomping and pedalling with agonistic fervour, in search of eternal youth.

In the villages, there are no stereotypical luxury brands, but endless shopping centres of technical equipment for sports fanatics, rock climbing, sailing and cycling. The consumerist side of this bourgeoisie with Central European values here reaches the height of satisfaction. And one wonders in the end if all the environmentalism of those who practise these sports is not in fact a big humbug: where will the discarded boards and sails and wetsuits and mountain bikes, with or without pedal assistance, helmets, knee pads, batteries, chargers, supports and technological devices, the indispensable Garmins, end up in landfills in the future? They are materials in a constant state of technological update, one year later they are already outclassed by new wonders, lighter, more functional, cooler. To look at them with serenity and detachment, these ecological sports are yet another virtuous illusion of modernity, which is of course always polluting, consuming and consumerist.

We observe a California model van, plastered with signs promising ‘Wildlife surveys - Experiential accompaniments - Landscape interpretation - Nature observations - Forest therapy - Natural tracking - Silent&Sound walking - Affective ecology’. Affective ecology, my foot. Here, one can palpably feel pissed off at the autonomous province of Trento, which has imported bears from Slovenia (‘without asking our permission,’ says one hotelier). The artist Marco Martello is finishing a monumental wooden bear in Molveno, commissioned by Funivie Trentine. He immediately became the target of insults and threats, resulting in a ‘media storm’. ‘I wish you to end up like Andrea Papi,’ they wrote, referring to the boy mauled last year by the JJ4 bear in Val di Sole. Not long ago there was alarm in the Upper Garda area because of the bear Kj1, which roamed around Arco with three cubs and attacked a French tourist. Collective panic, a lightning-fast kill order, environmentalists on the warpath, and so on and so forth.

We ask Fabio Galas, publisher of the much consulted online magazine La Busa, whether, apart from the bears and the complaints of the inhabitants who are struggling to find houses to rent because they end up in the tourism cauldron, and the controversy over the new cycle path that is supposed to extend over the lake to the Lombardy side on one side and the Veneto side on the other, while environmentalists prefer bicycle transport by water, whether, apart from these things that seem like trifles to us inhabitants of non-autonomous regions, there are other dramas. Crime? Theft? Not much. ‘There are many controls, carabinieri and local police are particularly active. Moreover, the municipality of Riva del Garda has created a cooperation protocol with the National Association of Carabinieri on leave so that volunteers can check the correctness of behaviour in public areas, on the beaches, as well as support the administration in pedestrian crossings in front of schools and during events'. In short, it seems that the most stolen things are bicycles, especially during the Bike Festival carnival. Bicycle thieves are therefore the height of crime. Life flows quietly, agriculture is well developed between vineyards and apple and olive groves, in the inland areas of the Sarca Valley there is also a flourishing industry, and in these hot weeks one lives well without air conditioning. In winter it is cold, but not that cold, because the lake makes the temperatures mild. There are no VIPs, no Chanel and LV and Dior, little or nothing makes the national news, you almost feel like moving. And be bored to death by the lack of indignation, crashed by the sports performances of others.


Read the full article on: https://www.ilfoglio.it/societa/2024/08/17/news/ecco-svelata-tutta-l-ecologia-bugiarda-del-lago-di-garda-6856927/