Northern Italy water adventures: raft, row, relax

We rowed like Venetian gondoliers. We rafted and drank wine on Verona’s river. Then we relaxed on a ferry that glided from town to town over Lake Garda’s azure waters in northern Italy.

By getting out on the water, we had fun, picked up new skills, learned local history, saw places from the same perspective as ancient travellers, and felt water’s well-documented restorative powers.

To hear river waves lap gently or see diamonds sparkle on lakes or feel the misty spray of a waterfall always calms me, makes me happy and peaceful. And Bill has always loved mucking about on boats. So when planning our two weeks in northern Italy’s romantic city of Verona (home to Romeo and Juliet), the lure of water adventures was hard to resist.

Verona: rafting and wine-tasting on the Adige River

The first equipment issued was a plastic champagne flute in a blue pocket with string to wear around our necks while rafting.

We’ve been whitewater rafting many times in Canada, but never with wine.

Until Verona.

When we registered with Adige Rafting for what turned out to be its outrageously fun Raft and Wine Tour, I noted that the website said lifejackets were mandatory but paddles optional. Optional! You could simply drink and float and forget paddling! I sent the link to our daughter Rachel, a whitewater rafting guide with Chinook Rafting in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains in Canada. I think I detected a touch of amused disdain in her ensuing texts, referring to our “booze cruise.”  

When we arrived at base camp, the first equipment issued was a plastic champagne flute in a blue pocket with string to wear around our necks while rafting. Sweet! We sat at our assigned table with our raft team (a couple from Madrid and two friends from Verona and Mantua) and the winetasting began.

Adige Rafting had partnered with the 99-year-old Fasoli Gino winery, and Fasoli’s David led us through the three tastings: a sparkling wine at the start, a white midway through the rafting trip, and a red at the end.

It turned out to be more than a tasting sample. Each table of six received an entire bottle of light, bubbly Garganega Brut – almost like a Prosecco. We sipped and munched the splendidly generous array of prosciutto and salamis, several cheeses, olives, crackers and bread, and tiny tomatoes.

We finished the bottle and then David came around and poured even more while he repeated his presentation in English just for us, about Fasoli Gino being a pioneer in organic wines since 1984 and powered by renewables since 2007.   

“Why isn’t this allowed in Ontario?” we kept asking, amidst our own laughter. We knew very well why not – the LCBO. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (in Canada), supported by the provincial government, rules with draconian liquor laws. All over Europe, when we’ve asked winery staff if they ship to Ontario, they all shake their heads ‘No’; the LCBO’s reputation is widely known.

However, here we were in Italy, where we didn’t get helmets or sign waivers. We and all our raftmates had opted for paddles though. I giggled, still thinking about the LCBO as we clambered into the rafts. Let the impaired paddling begin!

The late-afternoon sun held Verona’s hilltop Castle San Pedro and the fortified Castelvecchio bridge in a warm glow as we paddled past. 

Raft guide Martin, from Argentina, told us to sit at the front where we set the paddling pace for our raftmates. (I think we got that important position because we had previous experience.)

The sage-green Adige River was high and running fast after a lot of recent rain. Ducks passed by as Martin instructed us on the Italian commands: paddle forward = avanti; backwards = indietro; stop = …I forget. I couldn’t take notes while paddling and besides, Martin repeated everything in English too. (Note: He did not imbibe.)

We waved to people on the bridges and embankments, including a trio of nuns, and they waved back as we looped with the S-shaped Adige that hugs Verona’s historic core. The city’s origins are unclear, possibly dating to 500 years BCE, but the Romans came to town in 89 BCE and built some of the bridges we passed under.

The Adige – Italy’s second-longest river – was highly important economically and militarily. Its 410 kilometres begin in the Alps, supplied by glaciers, and flow to the Adriatic Sea just south of Venice. The Adige was used to take expensive spices and silks north into Europe, then bring goods like timber from the mountains southward to build Venice and its ships. We floated past a crumbling tower mid-river. Martin explained it was the 14^th-century Torre della Catena (Chain Tower), which used to support chains across the water at night to stop smugglers.

We passed under the fortified Castelvecchio bridge with its adjacent castle, built by the Scaliger family that was to Verona what the Medicis were to Florence – an all-powerful ruling dynasty. We quickly began to associate Scaligeri buildings with the distinctive swallow-tailed battlements. (We later visited the castle, built in the 1350s and suffered a variety of uses over the centuries. Napoleon lived there when he looted Verona and the Second World War caused notable damage, but a renovation in the 1980s turned it into a good museum, mostly of medieval Christian sculpture and paintings.)

The Ponte Pietra bridge, built by the Romans in 100 BCE, was partially blown up by retreating Germans in the Second World War, but the Veronese people dragged the original stones from the river and rebuilt the bridge.

After Ponte Pietra, we pulled onto a narrow sandy beach for our second tasting. David told us about the white – Borgoletto Soave DOC, a 2023 vintage with good minerality, low sugar and yellow fruit notes, according to the unclear notes I hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper then shoved into a pocket where it stayed moderately dry. I wondered if David’s winery job description included rafting.

One spot on the Adige had what could be called white water. Mostly, the water was smooth.

Although the water was high, it was mostly smooth, except for a few wee waves under one bridge. At the front, Bill and I took the brunt of the splashes, but compared with rafting in Canada, it was pretty tame. Whitewater rapids are classed 1 to 5; I would put this at 0.5. But for fun? It rates a full five!

At the third and final stop, near the customs house where ships had had to pay taxes, we docked the rafts on one of the few sets of steps at river level. Most of the Adige has tall embankments, built mostly after a devastating flood in 1882.

David described the tasty red Bardolino DOC, the same grape used for northern Italy’s famous Amarone wine (made from dried grapes for a more intense flavour). My notes were indecipherable by that point.

We stumbled home in the twilight, “soused and doused” as a friend commented later. What a blast!

Venice: rowing lesson on the canals

Jane, who founded Row Venice, taught us to row like gondoliers.  

Of course, it’s not hard to get out on the water in Venice, the city built on marshy islands with canals for streets and boats for vehicles. We took the handy bus-like vaporetti down the Grand Canal and over to the nearby islands of Murano and Burano.

But instead of paying for an expensive, yet admittedly romantic, gondola ride, we opted to learn the “voga alla veneta,” the Venetian style of rowing: standing up, facing forward, just like gondoliers.

From Verona, we did a day trip by train to Venice for our second northern Italy water experience: a lesson with Row Venice. Jane taught us how to stand on the long skinny boat, how to grip the long oar, how to keep it in the open oarlock, and how to ply the waters to keep the boat on a straight course.

It’s a lot trickier than it looks or sounds.

Jane was patient. She’s done this for more than a decade, ever since she founded Row Venice as a non-profit that supports female Venetian rowing athletes. She and the other female instructors teach rowing on a traditional boat called batela coda di gambero [shrimp-tailed batela].

Batele (the plural) used to be common work boats in Venice but began disappearing as outboard motors infiltrated after the Second World War. With similar dimensions to gondolas, batele are more stable and thus better for learning to row.

We began learning to row “a prua” [at the prow], standing inside the boat near the front. Standing! Standing up in a long, narrow boat – it just isn’t natural for Canadians who’ve spent their lives canoeing, where the first rule is to never stand up.

Jane was born in England, grew up in Australia, married an Italian and has lived in Venice for 34 years. Along with running Row Venice, she competes in regattas and regularly wins.

But Jane showed us how to place our feet to maintain our balance. Then she placed my hands on the oar and demonstrated the right wrist action to ensure proper steering. After we’d both practised the stroke while tied to the shore, we set off down a calm canal.

“Watch your wrists,” Jane called. I pushed them forward on the oar. And moved my feet wider to be more stable. And then the oar slipped out of the open oarlock so I had to hoist it back in. And then my wrists were in the wrong position again. This wasn’t easy!  

After mastering (and I use that term loosely) rowing a prua, we tied up again while Jane showed us rowing “a poppa” – steering the boat while standing at the stern, just like a gondolier.

I found rowing from the stern easier – more like using the J-stroke in the stern of a canoe. However, the potential of imminent dunking from standing on the rear “deck” made the batela more exciting.

We plied the serene canals, pulling in the oar when we came too close to another boat or a wall, and plied Jane with questions.

“Why aren’t there more female gondoliers?” I asked. Of the 430-odd gondoliers in Venice now (there used to be 10,000), only a handful are women.

“Most Venetian women would rather marry a gondolier than be one,” Jane replied wryly. The male-dominated profession, governed by the powerful gondoliers’ association that issues the coveted gondolier licences, was traditionally handed down from father to son.

The un-touristy Canareggio neighbourhood is one where Venetians live.

While rowing through the Canareggio neighbourhood at the north end of Venice, we caught occasional glimpses of the Venice Lagoon, where we were supposed to end our lesson. I nervously eyed the choppy waves there, with countless boats zipping all over. Due to an iffy weather forecast, Jane said we’d stick to the quiet canals. Phew!

In Canareggio (far less touristy than the packed St. Mark’s Square area), laundry flapped above canals, a father puttered by in a small boat with his daughter clad in a football (soccer) jersey and cleats, kids rode bikes and scooters along the canal edges with no railings, couples young and old sipped Aperol spritzes at café tables, and outside a pharmacy, a mother knelt before a child with a big welt on her arm.

Since we were rowing a traditional craft, I felt more part of these daily-life scenes. I loved it.  

Lake Garda: ferry from town to town

On Lake Garda, the largest of Italy’s lakes, we chose the more serene, more relaxing, and less expensive alternative: the ferry.

Planning a day trip to Lake Garda from Verona can be confusing. You could rent a car, but finding parking in the tourist-thronged towns along the lake is apparently just as insane as Italian driving. Bus tours are, well, bus tours; they don’t appeal to us and didn’t go to all the places we wanted to see. Small-group tours were expensive and also didn’t hit all our highlights. Once you get yourself to Lake Garda, you can rent a boat (super expensive) or opt for a boat tour that sounded much like the bus or small-group tours.

So, I planned a hybrid: we took the train (20 minutes) to the town of Desenzano, then the ferry to Sirmione, another ferry to Garda and Bardolino, then the bus back to Verona. Apart from a long wait for the bus, our transportation plan worked out well.

In Desenzano, we walked from the train station to a Roman villa archeological site. Built in the 1^st century BCE, the villa was covered in a 12^th-century landslide, rediscovered in 1921, and subsequently excavated. The town’s name is thought to be derived from one of the villa owners – Flavius Magnus Decentius. What a splendidly Roman name, when you repeat it several times.

We wandered amongst thermal baths and the former villa bedrooms, living and dining room, admiring the well-preserved mosaic floors with scenes of boats, fish and cherubs. The villa reminded us, on a smaller scale, of Portugal’s Conimbriga – an entire Roman town.

We sauntered from the villa to Desenzano’s lovely waterfront promenade, lined with shady trees, pretty pastel mansions and citrus gardens. Crossing an arched bridge over a stream, we found the ferry dock and discovered the ferry to Sirmione was leaving in 15 minutes. Perfect timing!

We found seats on the upper outer deck, but I kept popping up to stand at the railing and feel the somewhat-cool breeze. With the hot, humid day, a haze clung to the distant views, obscuring the Dolomite mountains that allegedly line the northern shores of Lake Garda. The gorgeous waters, however, recompensed our disappointment with the haze. Turquoise near the lake edges, moving to azure and a cobalt tone in deeper waters, the water sparkled and lifted our spirits.

The crenellated Castello Scaligero and its fortified harbour drew us in as the ferry approached Sirmione.

Sirmione (pronounced Sir-mee-own; not as a rhyme with Harry Potter’s friend Hermione) with its Castello Scaligero, was easily the prettiest of the towns we visited and, logically, the most crowded. The 14^th-century castle, with its swallow-tail crenellations, is the main draw. We enjoyed climbing the towers and walking along the walls, especially for the magnificent views over the lake and the castle’s fortified harbour directly below. The castle is small; our visit didn’t take long.  

By then it was midday and scorchingly hot, so we opted not to walk the 1.5 kilometres to the Grotte di Catullo archeological site, another Roman villa. However, when we were on the ferry from Sirmione to Garda, we passed by the site. It did look interesting and probably worth a visit.

We could have got off the ferry in Garda, where we saw more swallow-tailed crenellations on buildings, and walked along the 3.5-kilometre lakeside path to Bardolino. But – way too hot. We stayed on the ferry to Bardolino.

The pretty town of Garda features another swallow-tail-crenelated monument – the Villa Albertini.

On the ferry, I again tried to glean mountain views through the haze. We caught tempting glimpses here and there, and I may have spotted a snow-capped peak, but it was hard to tell if it was snow or clouds.

We alighted in Bardolino and scoped out the harbour square – a leaning tower and a marble slab table called the Preonda. Although used in the past as a fish stall and meeting point, now it’s a sign of good luck; walk around it and things will go your way. So, we circled the Preonda, then went off in search of gelato. 

Licking our cones, we sauntered along the waterfront promenade, stopping to remove our shoes and wade in the cool waters. We should have brought our bathing suits; we passed several tempting beaches. Instead, we waded again.

Our walk led us to Lenotti Cellars Winery. I had hoped to taste the Bardolino wines for which the area is famous. Disappointingly, Lenotti was simply a wine store with an apathetic clerk; he showed no inclination to even sell us wine, never mind educate us about it, as many other wine shop clerks in northern Italy had done.

The walk around the Preonda hadn’t worked. Under the heading of “other disappointments” – the Olive Oil Museum and the Wine Museum were too far for a hot walk. (We should have taken a taxi.)

So, back to the harbour square. We found a café and ordered a half-litre of Bardolino Chiaretto Spumante Brut – a refreshing, bubbly cross between a Prosecco and a rosé. Ahhh.

We sat for a while, sipping, enjoying the free snacks, and watching another ferry deliver a batch of relaxed people, calmed by their journey over the water in northern Italy.

Gelato and wading in Lake Garda’s pretty waters helped us cool down on a scorching day in June.

We visited Verona, Venice and Lake Garda in May-June 2024. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.