To begin with, a warning to readers: whatever I write concerning Lake Garda, its towns, its high hinterland, its seductive colours and fragrances - all will fall short of Garda's reality. The notes I made, the photographs I took, the fading memories, (already!) of our early September idyll: all are failures of a kind.
But first, a memory: it is an image of a man in one of the tents at Camp Toscolano who reminded me intensely of the writer Paul Theroux. I first saw him the night we arrived when, after dark and settled into our mobile home, my wife and I strolled to the edge of the water. The sky felt close, completely black, as if we were bathed in a soothing amniotic darkness that touched our eyes, caressed our arms, and brought the lights across the lake into pin-point brilliance.
Camp Toscolano had many tents, some privately owned. All around us they stood like cubes of translucent light, lit from within by electricity or oil lamps.
When you stared at them you discerned the campers' shadows, grotesquely looming. From some came the clatter of busy cooking and foreign pop tunes, conversations in gargled Italian. And right behind us on the edge of the scumble of stones that passed for a beach, was the tent of the lookalike Signor Theroux.
We heard a cough, and there he was, stretching his arms into the sky. "Buona sera," I said. There was silence. It was precisely what you'd expect from the famously reticent Mr Theroux. I decided to check him out in daytime.
But I forgot. Next morning we stared at our map of the lake and its environs. What in the course of the next two weeks would become a necklace of little treasure spots strung round the edges of the lake, with their harbours and cafes, favourite churches, craft shops, dispensers of home-made ice-cream, places of wonderful ease and temptation, were for now mere names on the map: Portese, Limone, Sirmione, Riva, Malcesine. Our eyes darted, our tongues looped and trilled around their syllables. We took the plunge, and headed south.
Lake Garda is long, 40 miles north-south. The town of Riva sits at its tip. Toscolano was close to its southerly shore where the mountains shrug, becoming desultory, greener, flattening out into rumpled hills.
We took the road along the lakeside to Portese, some 12 miles away. From the coastal route, ribs of highway dip towards the ports and the great expanse of Quink-coloured lake. Portese village sits on the flanks of a thick green hillside, covered in cypress and oleander trees, but its port is little more than a handful of houses, restaurants, a bar, and a picturesque harbour with nodding boats beside the car park. What makes it special is its view of the town of Salo, one of those places, backed by mountains, that looks magnificent from a distance - its bright, gentle terracotta roofs and fine palazzos, its church towers tinging out the hours, have a sweetly soporific allure - but it disappoints on closer acquaintance.
From Portese - outside a hotel we had chosen by chance - we lounged beneath parasols, guzzling ice-cream, staring across to the farther shore and the town of Torri. Every so often we saw small ferryboats intersect as they crossed from Torri to Maderno, an east-west trip through the rising heat haze that we would discover was a feature of most afternoons. And there, far above, we could, if we squinted, see two tiny hillside churches, perched on high rocks above Toscolano. It was from one of these we'd heard early morning chimes, calling parishioners to Mass while we'd lain in bed - a sound clear as water, but somehow forlorn, the sound of unrequited hope.
I spotted Theroux again that night as we ate at the restaurant on the campsite, where the menu was restricted (great for pizzas and various meats, with fine red wine), and amazing value. Theroux was walking beneath the trees, in the dappled light of the setting sun, clutching his takeaway. His arms were wreathed in tattoos. It could not be him, unless the tattoos read: "I love Jorge Luis Borges." He caught my stare, and looked away.
In the next few days we went mad for boat trips, in lovely weather, sailing to Torri, one of the two finest towns on the eastern side of the lake. We boated to Riva. We crossed from Malcesine to Limone.
In my notes I have written: "Today the water is cobalt, and that is perfect. For yachts are racing to the north, their white sails matched by the scratch of their wakes on the lovely surface. They dunk and dip and rise and lean, and at first we watch them from the ferry crossing to Torri, then later sitting on a bench beneath the shade of Torri's seafront oleanders, we stare at their pennants, a cluster of wings so far away."
Torri is pretty. A bountiful honey-pot much visited by Germans, as are the larger towns on the westward side of the lake. Its jollity seems reflected in our eyes in holiday photos: my wife like a sprite released by sunlight at the rail of the Tonale at Torri harbour; me on the alpine top of Mount Balde, above Malcesine, at the end of a bracing, precipitous ride in the cable car that serves skiers through the winter. Up there the air had the taste of champagne, and the lake below was a shroud of blue. It gave us ideas. We took to the hills.
The hills above Garda are magnificent. We drove up the western shoreline, and tipped the nose of the car towards the sky. Up through the groves of pencil-slim cypresses, just like a jet lifting off in slo-mo, ekeing out every bird's-eye glimpse of the view of Bogliaco and Gargano, among their lemon groves below.
Layers of history fell away. We threaded through villages, crawled the edges of high, bushy gulches and then saw Lake Idro, an alpine vista of Christmas-in-waiting, and almost deserted. Later we drove to the very dead end of the Pass of Tremalzo, 6,000 feet up, where we met a chapter of German Hell's Angels spring cleaning their beards in the late summer's breeze.
The two weeks were packed with such startling images.
Later, still heady from Idro's ozone, we sat in Limone, busy Limone with its Gucci-Versace frontage, and watched Garda's ferries, its motorboat taxis, its little flotilla of lakeside ducks, waft in an out. We hadn't yet visited Sirmione, a late discovery, hadn't yet dined at Moniga's fish restaurant, browsed through Riva, or seen the bullet holes in the wall, a relic of war, on Torri's town hall. And what of Theroux? I never met him again. If he writes about his Gardalife, his prose will perhaps do it justice, tell it true. We, for our part, shall simply return.