Gardone Riviera

Gardone owes its fortune to the climate, and with the climate it lost almost everything. Sheltered from the cold winds and warmed by the water of the lake, this shore grows palms, agaves, camphor trees and capers on the south-facing walls, and for centuries it grew citrus: in 1851 fifty-four lemon houses were counted. In 1855 came gummosis, a disease that attacked the plants and ruined the crop; only from 1873, by grafting the bitter orange that resisted it, did a few lemon houses work again.

It was that same mild climate, however, that turned a poor farming village into a holiday resort, when at the end of the nineteenth century doctors from half of Europe were looking for places suited to the cure of lung diseases. Today Gardone Riviera lives on tourism, and the most visited place is the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the residence of Gabriele D'Annunzio, now a foundation open to the public. There is also a botanical garden tended by the artist André Heller. Two thousand seven hundred and thirteen inhabitants in the province of Brescia, on the Brescian shore of Garda.