Sirmione

Catullus praised it as the "jewel of peninsulas", and its slender spit stretches Sirmione four kilometres into Lake Garda. At the entrance, the moat-ringed thirteenth-century Scaliger castle is one of Italy's most theatrical; at the tip, the Grotte di Catullo — the largest Roman villa in northern Italy — steps down through olive trees toward Caribbean-coloured water.

In between lie sulphur springs known since antiquity and the lanes where Maria Callas once lived. The trick is timing: before ten or after six, when the peninsula breathes again and the Garda turns gold.