"Know you the land where the lemon-trees bloom?" ("Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluhn?") That's Goethe in one of his bestknown lyrics. And in his Italian Journey he wrote of the sun and the fruit and the lovely trout he ate on the very lake from which the latest holiday fax-in-lieu-ofa-letter came: known now as Garda, earlier as Benacus. Goethe noticed Limone, whose terraced hillside gardens were planted with lemon trees.
Our 1997 correspondent tells us Goethe's story and a bit more. Limone has overcome one of the problems of its geography. For, in the afternoon, the village, tucked into the steep western side of the lake, loses the afternoon sun. But the growers took ingenious measures: they built columns about 10 feet tall among the lemon trees to absorb the heat of the morning and noon sun and act as, more or less, storage heaters, holding on to the heat long after the sun had left the groves.
Approaching by steamer, you could imagine, from a distance, that these columns were the remains of early Greek temples. The lemons are juicy, writes our correspondent, and so large that slices need to be quartered to fit into a glass of gin and tonic or lemon tea. And Limone has fame in another area, too. In 1979 a man from there was found to have very high levels of cholesterol in his blood, but there were no clinical signs of damage to the heart or arteries. Further examination of his blood identified a protein which removes the fat from the arteries, thus preventing arteriosclerosis and heart disease.
The gene associated with this protein is known as the Limone gene, is found in many of the inhabitants, and is the subject of ongoing research. The inhabitants of Limone, writes our correspondent, have a longer than average lifespan: perhaps due to this gene, or the good diet of lake fish and lemons, or the regular daily exercise in climbing many steps from the shore to this village built into the cliff - or a combination of all three. (The discovery about the genes is attributed to Professor Cesare Sartori of Milan University in 1979.)