La Rocca di Garda

Garda's Rocca is the hill that gave the lake its name. The Rocca is the rocky spur closing the gulf, crowned by the sparse remains of a fortress whose guard post — warda in the old Germanic tongue of its masters — eventually replaced Benaco as the water's very name.

Why it matters

The Comune classifies the whole hill as a park and the destination's defining natural site, where geology, military history and lake panorama meet. Fortified from late antiquity, held by kings and fought over by cities, the Rocca later gave its name to the lake itself — proof of how large this small hill loomed in medieval geography. From the Rocca, the gulf extends from Punta San Vigilio to Sirmione, framed by olive terraces and Mediterranean scrub above the old town.

What to notice

The fortress was slighted centuries ago, and only low traces of wall and foundation punctuate the summit terraces. Paths wind through downy oak, cypress, holm oak and laurel, with orchids in the thin pastures and songbirds — hoopoe, golden oriole and wryneck — in warmer months. A votive statue of the Madonna del Pign stands on the lower slopes, and the hillside also harbours the fifteenth-century Camaldolese hermitage recorded in the town's monument lists. The gulf closes at San Vigilio, with the peninsula of Sirmione across the water and Bardolino's shoreline to the north-west.

Context and history

The hill has drawn people since the Bronze Age, and finds displayed from its excavations include a fifth-century gold coin of the Byzantine emperor Zeno and a Gothic fibula — evidence that a fortress stood here as the Roman order dissolved. The story that made the Rocca famous belongs to 951, when Adelaide of Burgundy, widow of King Lothair, was imprisoned here on the orders of Berengar II after refusing to marry his son; her escape and later marriage to Otto I made her empress, and eventually a saint, and the legend of her flight through a chiselled passage — the "grotta di Adelaide" — is still told on the hill. The Arab traveller Ibrahim al-Turtushi, visiting in the 960s, judged the fortress imposing and strongly defended. In 1193 Emperor Henry VI sold the Rocca to Verona for seven hundred silver marks; early in the thirteenth century its own garrison demolished the fortress, for reasons no record explains, and the town grew in its shadow as a fishing and market settlement.