Sirmione trip planner

A vacation guide to the Lake Garda town of Sirmione—medieval castles, Roman ruins, and resort hotels

If you look closely at a map of Lake Garda, from the very middle of the flat, southern end of the lake springs a long, skinny peninsula, rarely more than a few hundreds yards wide, jutting about two miles into the lake.

At this tip of this spit of land sits Sirmione, the loveliest town on Lake Garda.

The Castle - Castello Scagliero

The Scaglier Castle. (Photo by yilmaz ovunc.)I love driving to Sirmione because you literally have to have a guard let you over the drawbridge, across the moat and, and under the portcullis of the remarkably intact castle walls in order to get into town.

(Not that I advise driving through town. There's basically one street, crammed with pedestrians, so you inch along much more slowly than if you were walking, squeezing the other tourists up against the walls and getting very dirty looks for about 20 minutes. Still, it's cool to be stopped at the castle gate by a guard—even if you're just in a rented Fiat rather than atop a white stallion.)

Merlins on the Castello Scagliero. (Photo by RoCam) The Scaglieri clan of Verona placed this 13th century keep at the narrowest point of Sirmione's long peninsula, and effectively created an island of the end of it by dredging out a moat from one side to the other. The stone citadel was in use as a fortress until the 19th century.

Though the interior is almost barren, the climb up the 93-foot tower is worth it for the panorama.

The Castello Scagliero is at Piazza Castello 1, Sirmione (tel. +39- 030-916-468).

It's open Tuesday to Sunday from 8:30am to 7:30pm (October to March, it closes at 4:30pm).

The town

The town of Sirmione. (Photo by Keksylein)Once you're past the castle, you'll find Sirmione is a popular resort town, with plenty of hotels, piazzas open to the sea, shopping, and gelato parlors, but also some fine little churches like the 8th century San Pietro in Mavino with its medieval frescoes.

The town's real show-stopper, though, is the ruined complex of a Roman villa at the promontory's very tip called the Grotte di Catullo.

The Roman villa - Grotte di Catullo

The villa at Grotte di Catullo, Sirmione. (Photo courtesy of Brescia Tourism). This villa—park of a lovely, park-like archeological complex extending over five acres—is the second-best surviving example of a Roman private home in all of northern Italy.

It is not, however, a grotto, nor did it ever belong to Catullus.

The ancient Roman poet Catullus, whose family was from Verona, did, indeed, take his holidays at Sirmione. However, there is zero evidence that this vast ancient complex was actually his villa.

In fact, it was probably built after his death, sometime in the 1st century BC atop a series of underwater caves containing some of the natural hot springs that well up in spots all over the waters of Garda.

Ruins at Le Grotte di Catullo. (Photo by David Blaikie) The town simply decided to name its most famous Roman ruins after its most famous ancient Roman resident.

It was misnamed a "grotto" because, in later centuries, the romantically overgrown ruins, covered in an olive grove twittering with birdsong, seemed to be a network of underground caves.

You can visit these surviving passageways, some retaining decorative stuccoes, only on guided tours.

The Grotte di Catullo is located on the tip of the Sirmione peninsula at Piazzale Orti Manara 4 (tel. +39-030-916-157, www.archeologica.lombardia.beniculturali.it).

Its open hours are slightly complicated, but basically:

• March to October it's open Tuesday to Saturday from 8:30am to 7:30pm, Sunday from 9:30am to 6:30pm.
• Novemebr to February, it's open Tuesday to Saturday from 8:30am to 4:30pm (though the small museum on site stays open until 7:30pm), Sunday from 8:30am to 2pm.
  

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