Limone sul Garda

The lemons really are there, but the name does not come from them. The soundest hypothesis traces it to a Celtic root meaning elm, or to the Latin limen, boundary: here the territory of Brescia ended and the jurisdiction of the bishop of Trento began, and the border between two provinces and two regions still runs through. The place name Lemonum is attested as early as 1192, and between 1863 and 1905 the municipality was actually called Limone San Giovanni. The lemon houses, though, are its face: terraces of tall white pillars on which beams were laid to stretch sheets against the frosts, and inside them braziers were lit to warm the air. The duchy of Milan built them so as not to buy lemons abroad, and Goethe described them from his boat in 1786.

Until the nineteen forties Limone could be reached only from the lake or over the mountains: the lakeside road was completed in 1932. It is precisely from that very long isolation that the discovery comes which has made the village famous among doctors. In the nineteen seventies the pharmacologist Cesare Sirtori found in the inhabitants a mutated form of apolipoprotein, since called ApoA-1 Milano: it produces a beneficial variant of cholesterol and lowers the risk of arteriosclerosis. In a village of about a thousand people, a dozen have passed a hundred years of age. The mutation has been traced back to a single man who lived here in 1654: Giovanni Pomaroli.