We left Venice to travel up to Italy’s largest lake, Lake Garda and the drive took us towards the Italian Alps, where snow rests on the caps and the switchbacks are amazing - real James Bond driving territory.
We stayed at Reva del Garda, the furthermost point of the lake, known for its windsurfing, all types of sailing, mountain bike riding and stunning scenery. It felt great to be in such a grand scale of natural beauty.
The town is perched in the prong of a valley with a wide arc running parallel to the sea, a stunning clear deep blue green. On either side the mountains rise, a severe grey stone with the occasional castle or church remnant tucked into a precipitous 140 degree angle which would in all probability have caused numerous deaths, split hernias and a dutiful local populace.
We hired bikes for the day and covered 27km (on Fin’s calculations), stopping for lunch in Arco, a medieval town hewn from the local stone and very charming. The place was abuzz with cycling tour teams of all ages, all in designer clad cycling outfits and predominately Austrian + German so it all felt very European and we felt very Australian in our mish mash non cycling outfits and our monolingual ability.
We climbed up Arco Castle built in the 10th century which really illustrated the point of height and difficulty as an advantage in defense. The history of the castle with its clashes and feuds, invasions and decimations over the centuries made for an active game of archers defending their keep against the invading hordes from the North. That was really a lot of fun and must have had something to do with the altitude.
Milan was our next stop and apart from the Duomo (an over the top Gothic Cathedral and the worlds largest taking 600 odd years to build starting in 1386) + the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle 2 (gorgeous and a voluminous feeling of space) the place is a grimy, polluted and no need to recall zone.
Firenze, or Florence as the Anglo goes, was a delight and we would go again in a heart beat. We all loved it and visited most of the essential tourist destinations. To see works of art, buildings and settings that have been printed or described in books, films + tv series and then to be amongst it all bought me a sense of the authenticity and connection to the Renaissance and its achievements. Everything is in walking distance which to my mind is one of the great triumphs of urban planning so notable in Europe, so lacking in Australia. Most streets open to Piazzas, a square of varied sizes that has places to rest, linger, gossip, eat, shop etc and or feature significant galleries, churches, palazzios etc. Like Venice this was a truly lively engaging place.
The small Uccello in the Uffizi was my favourite painting. The figure, composition and colour is so different from all the works of that time I’m at a loss to see why its not more widely celebrated:no postcards of it either. We spent almost 3 hours there which was a minor miracle for the boys and hopefully some tidbits of information have been imprinted on their memory cells apart from the overwhelming impression that most Baby Jesus’ look like deformed cherubs or way too gangly to be suckling on the breast. Botticelli’s Birth Of Venus and Spring also stood out from the overwhelming sentiment of this period to paint excessively the Madonna / Baby.
The boys had been amazed to see a young girl meticulously sketching in pen one of the paintings in the Uffizi. So Steve bought them some Moleskin pocketbooks which they took to sketch Michelangelo’s David – a really sweet sight. It is a powerful work especially in scale and the luminous whiteness of the marble and of course the nudity yet we all had the same immediate observation: the head and hands are oversized and too big for the body. Mon Dieu – sacrilege.
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