Nago-Torbole

In 1439 the Republic of Venice needed a fleet on Lake Garda and did not have one, so it carried one over the mountains. Twenty-five barges and six galleys left the Adriatic, went up the Adige as far as the river port of Ravazzone, and from there were dragged by arms and by oxen across Mori, then along the rio Cameras to the lake of Loppio, over the pass of San Giovanni, down the Bocca di Nago and the valley of Santa Lucia, and were lowered into the water near Torbole. The enterprise was called Galeas per montes, it used about two thousand oxen and cost fifteen thousand ducats. The first attempt failed; in April 1440 the little Venetian fleet defeated the Visconti one and took Riva del Garda.

Here the winds have names, and the people know one from another. The Òra comes from the south in the afternoon, the most constant and the most famous, at some ten or twelve metres a second. The Vent Paesàm comes from the north at night and in the morning, weaker; when the waves raised by the Òra are running north and the Paesàm pushes south, it peels them, and that effect is called the Peler — although commonly, and wrongly, that name is given to the wind itself. The Ponale is rare and very strong and announces storms, and comes down from the valley of Ledro; the Balinòt blows in winter off Monte Ballino. It is those winds that made the place: from the second half of the twentieth century they brought the windsurfers, and the world championship of 1980 turned a village of fishermen and farmers into a tourist town. Other things had passed through before. Goethe stopped here in September 1786; the castle of Penede above Nago was destroyed by French troops in 1703; the comune was annexed by order to Riva del Garda by the fascist authorities in 1929 and re-established by referendum in 1957; and in the tunnel dug to discharge the Adige into the Garda, still unfinished, from the late spring of 1944 a Caproni workshop made aircraft parts for the Messerschmitt works and components of the machines known as V1 and V2.