Torri del Benaco

On the stone slabs polished by the glaciers, around here, there are more rock carvings than at any other point on this side of the lake; the oldest are of the Bronze Age. In 905 the king of Italy Berengar I came to Torri and stayed: he had the ring of walls built, of which wide stretches still remain, and the tower that carries his name, today in the church square, and from here he dated six diplomas rewarding those who had helped him against a rival. Later the Scaligeri raised the castle, one of the most important strongholds of the whole Garda — and inside it, on the south side, there is a citrus greenhouse of 1760, which is where the lemon trees passed the winter.

From 1405, under Venice, Torri became the seat of the Gardesana dell'Acqua, a federation of ten comuni of the lake whose task was to put down smuggling and to share out the tax burden among its members; it was presided over by the Captain of the Lake, and the room where its council met is today part of a hotel. The heads of household of the village had their own assembly, the vicinia, and the book of the minutes of those sittings is what tells us how the fishermen and the peasants here lived in the seventeen hundreds. The plagues of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds halved the population: the sick were gathered by one church and in the monastery attached to another. In 1797 Napoleon's soldiers landed at Torri, and in the water in front of Pai an Austrian flotilla put the French to flight.