An Italian Lake You've Just Garda See Again

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. If you're just joining us, start with Part 1: An Italian Lake You've Just Garda See At Least Once.

This Time I Brought the Kids

2019 was the family expedition. The main objective was simple: get Emily, my daughter, who was ten at the time and the perfect age for it, to Disneyland Paris. That was the whole plan. Everything else - Chamonix, Lake Garda, the drive home through Austria and Germany and Luxembourg and Holland - was hung off that one promise to a ten year old. This is how I plan holidays. With great ambition and, according to Loraine, insufficient regard for what's actually achievable.

We collected Ethan, Ben, and Emily from Heathrow and drove straight to France. Paris first, a few days at Disneyland, then south to Chamonix for the mountains. Then Italy.

We nearly ran out of fuel on the outskirts of Milan. Google Maps had routed us through an industrial estate that looked like someone had turned the clocks back to 1983 and then left. I found a petrol station, couldn't work the prepaid machine because it was entirely in Italian, and went inside to ask for help. The man behind the counter and the old man standing at it looked at me with genuine goodwill but absolutely no comprehension. We tried hand gestures. We tried slower hand gestures. We were getting nowhere.

Then somehow the question of where I was from came up. I said South Africa.

The old man's hands went to his face. "South Africa! South Africa!" He was saying it like I'd just announced I'd arrived from the moon. Amazed. Almost overwhelmed. I assumed he must have been there once, maybe in the army, maybe he had family there, something to explain the reaction.

"Sì, sì, South Africa," I said. "Have you been?"

"No."

Just excited by the name, apparently. One of the more cheerful interactions I've ever had in a petrol station.Yet another reminder of why I love the Italian people. I genuinely cannot think of a negative interaction in this country. Every single time, warm, generous, brilliant company. Well, except for those criminal bastards who ripped us off at the petrol station outside Pompeii in 2013. But that's another story.

Five Days, Three Kids, One Kill Switch

We stayed just outside Peschiera del Garda for about five days, and it was everything I'd wanted it to be. Emily had a little fold-out scooter we'd bought in Paris, which she loved riding up and down the pathways along the lake edge. Ben borrowed it at one point to nip down to a restaurant where I'd left my driver's licence. He came off it. Fortunately he survived and so did the scooter. Though his leg was one giant scab for the next week.

One afternoon in the gelateria in town, a wonderfully quintessential old Italian man spotted Emily in the little Italian dress Loraine had just bought her and fell completely in love with her in the most beautiful way. "Emilia! Bellissimo! Ciao, Emilia!" She was mortified and absolutely delighted at the same time, the way ten year olds are.

We rented a speedboat. Me and the boys did backflips off the back into the water, and we all had a swim out in the middle of the lake. All was going extremely well until the engine gave up and wouldn’t start after our swim. We looked at each other. We checked everything we could think of. We tried the ignition again. Nothing. Mild panic was setting in when I noticed Emily sitting there quietly, turning something over in her hands. The little red kill switch cord. She'd innocently plucked it out of the dashboard without thinking while we were in the water and had absolutely no idea she'd brought the whole operation to a halt. She didn't even know what it was. The whole Collins family adrift on Lake Garda. Our summer cruise defeated by a ten year old and a small red cord. We couldn't even be annoyed about it.

We had gelato most evenings. We played board games and watched TV and ate pizza and did all the things that feel ordinary at home and somehow perfect on holiday. Five days is longer than we'd ever stayed before, and with the kids there it started to feel less like a visit and more like a glimpse of something else. What it might actually be like to live there. To have this as the backdrop for the everyday stuff. To have gelato be a Tuesday thing rather than a holiday thing.

One morning I walked out onto the balcony with a cup of coffee and the Dutch guy in the next room was sitting at his laptop, facing my direction. He gave a big friendly wave and bellowed “Hellooo!”, so I raised my coffee cup and said "morning mate." He immediately started gesturing apologetically, pointing at the screen. He was on a Skype call with his family back in Holland and had been waving at them, not me. The kids thought this was one of the funniest things they'd ever seen and kept reminding me all holiday.

Before leaving we drove up to Riva del Garda at the northern tip, had a picnic, walked around, took it in. Three more converts. Ethan, Ben, and Emily now understood what I'd been going on about for the better part of a decade. I was, if anything, more convinced than ever that I wanted to live there one day.

Back to Check if It's Still There

Last year Loraine and I managed to carve out a long weekend, which is about all work commitments and dogs would allow. We flew in on Friday afternoon, flew home Monday morning. A whistle stop, but we had a plan, which at this point in our lives counts as a luxury.

We'd been hearing about housing grants in the Trentino region for a while, the kind of scheme that lets you buy a crumbling old place in the foothills for next to nothing if you agree to renovate it. We wanted to go and have a proper look. Not just talk about it over wine for the twelfth consecutive year, but actually drive around the towns and see whether this was a real idea or just a very pleasant fantasy we'd been maintaining since 2013.

Not just talk about it over wine for the twelfth consecutive year, but actually drive around the towns and see whether this was a real idea or just a very pleasant fantasy.

First stop was Brescia on the Friday night. We stayed at a hotel where the sommelier, or whatever the Italian word is for a man who’s clearly got the gift of the gab with both wine and women, was an absolute character. Smooth, charming, extremely complimentary towards Loraine. Perhaps a touch too complimentary, but he was Italian, so we’ll let it go. The wine was excellent. The conversation was excellent. Most importantly, we were back in Italy.

Saturday we drove to Lake Garda. We stopped first at Lazise, the town where I'd done that mountain bike ride back in 2011, had a walk around, a coffee, a bite to eat. It was exactly as I'd remembered it, which is to say quietly spectacular. Then we drove up to Riva del Garda at the northern tip of the lake and checked in. That evening we walked into town, had a wander around the shops, and found a restaurant right on the water's edge. Bottle of wine, fantastic food, some kind of low-key festival happening nearby with live music that was subtle and warm rather than loud and intrusive. We walked back to the hotel afterwards feeling entirely safe and entirely content. Lake Garda, as ever, did not disappoint. It never does. That's almost the whole point.

Sunday we drove up into the Trentino foothills to look at the grant scheme towns properly. The drives were spectacular, and the Dolomites don’t mess about. Every turn, every view was better than the one before. But the towns themselves weren't quite what we were after. A bit too remote, a bit too quiet, not quite compelling enough to be the forever place. We crossed it off the shortlist, which felt like the right call, and headed back south.

The Lake I Wasn't Expecting

We needed to be within striking distance of Milan for our flight on Monday morning, so we stopped for the night at Lake Iseo. Smaller than Garda, quieter and sort of tucked away in between Como and Garda. We booked into a hotel, parked the car, and walked into town. There was a market running along both sides of the river. That evening we had dinner on a terrace next to the bridge by the old railway station, at a restaurant named La Stazione.

I wasn't expecting much from Lake Iseo. But I came away thinking about it quite seriously. It has the beauty of Garda but without the tourist infrastructure, which depending on what you're looking for is either a drawback or the whole point. It's half an hour from Milan airport, which matters when you're still working in the UK and need to get back at short notice. For the first time in fourteen years, I've found somewhere that sits alongside Lake Garda on the shortlist rather than beneath it.

For the first time in fourteen years, I've found somewhere that sits alongside Lake Garda on the shortlist rather than beneath it.

That's not a demotion for Lake Garda. It's more of a promotion for Iseo. Lake Garda is a place I'll go back to for the rest of my life, whether that ends up being as a visitor or something more permanent. Italy as a whole is a story that hasn't finished for me and Loraine, not by a long way.

I keep telling myself I should see more of Italy. Florence deserves more than ten minutes in a car park. Puglia deserves more than a drive-through. The Dolomites deserve a week, minimum. (2026. I mean it this time.)

But whenever I get an opportunity, I'll go to Lake Garda.

I always do. The lake has a way of making everywhere else feel like it can wait.

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. If you're just joining us, start with Part 1: An Italian Lake You've Just Garda See At Least Once.)

Lake Garda sits in northern Italy between Verona and Brescia, roughly an hour from both Milan and Verona airports. If you're going, give yourself more than a day. You won’t regret it.