The 6 best lake towns within two hours of Bologna

1. Costermano sul Garda

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list two tables here.

1 h 50 min from Bologna · homes €1,850 to €3,100 a m² in the center · 3,967 people

Why visit Costermano sul Garda

The commune sits on a moraine amphitheater twenty-five kilometers northwest of Verona. The hills were a feud of the Brescia monastery of Santa Giulia in the early Middle Ages, then passed through Scaliger and Venetian rule before joining Italy in 1866; the name sul Garda was added only in 2018, to anchor the town's tourism identity to the water it sits above rather than on.

That distinction matters here: this is not a lakefront village but a hill settlement looking down at the shore, its center, its cemetery hill, and its vineyard slopes arranged around the belvedere at Marciaga rather than around a harbor. The economy runs on olive oil and hillside vines, and on the holiday accommodation that has filled these slopes since the 1970s, but the single largest reason people come here is not agricultural.

The cemetery holds the dead of a war fought decades after the monastery's feud and centuries after the Scaliger lords, and it sits on the same morainal hill as the sanctuary, the parish church, and the vine rows, a place where the working landscape and the memorial landscape occupy the same short walk rather than separate zones.

The center sits at 237 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Costermano sul Garda

• Santuario della Madonna del Castello. Sanctuary on the spur of Marciaga, its fifteenth-century frescoes intact, with a terrace looking over Lake Garda and the eastern shore.
• Deutsche Soldatenfriedhof. The graves cover the hillside above the lake, laid out since 1967 for the dead of the Second World War, a place kept in silence rather than commentary.
• Chiesa di San Siro. Parish church rebuilt in the nineteenth century in the center of the village, its freestanding campanile visible from the surrounding slopes.

How to get to Costermano sul Garda

Bologna is about 1 h 50 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

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2. Lazise

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

1 h 54 min from Bologna · homes €2,950 to €4,400 a m² in the center · 6,850 people

Why visit Lazise

Lazise sits at 76 meters on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, twenty kilometers northwest of Verona. The first walls went up shortly after the 983 charter; Venice took the town in 1405 and held it until Napoleon arrived in 1796, and Porta Lion, on the south, still carries the winged lion of Saint Mark from that period of rule.

The castle anchors the southern corner of the fortifications while the harbor sits enclosed within their reach, and the church and the customs house both face onto that same stretch of water, one built for worship and later pressed into use as a warehouse, the other built outright for Venice to tax what passed through the port. Behind the town, the morainic hills carry the vines of the Bardolino DOC, and Lazise counts itself among the Veneto's wine and honey communes.

The town reads, in short, as a small fortified port whose walls, harbor and customs works were all built to serve and guard the same trade on the same shore.

The center sits at 76 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Lazise

• Castello Scaligero. Rectangular fortress at the south corner of the walls, with five square towers and a fortified dock built for the lake galleys, facing Lake Garda.
• Mura medievali. Thirteen surviving towers and three gates, San Zeno, Nuova and Lion, ring the old town along the shore of Lake Garda.
• Chiesa di San Nicolò. Romanesque church on the harbor, with frescoes attributed to the Giotto school and a former function as a customs warehouse.

How to get to Lazise

Bologna is about 1 h 54 min away by road.

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3. Bardolino

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

1 h 53 min from Bologna · homes €3,500 to €5,000 a m² in the center · 6,861 people

Why visit Bardolino

Bardolino sits on the eastern shore of Lake Garda at 65 meters, twenty-five kilometers northwest of Verona. The hills behind town have been planted with vines since the Roman period, and the modern DOC was granted in 1968.

Three grapes do the work: Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. Long maceration produces Bardolino, the light red the town has lived on since the nineteenth century; short skin contact produces Chiaretto, the rosé that has overtaken the red in current sales.

Two churches hold the medieval line. San Zeno in the centro storico is ninth-century, one of the oldest in the province of Verona.

San Severo, built between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on the foundations of an earlier church mentioned in an 893 charter of Berengario, is the town's Romanesque anchor. The lakefront has been a tourist promenade since the 1950s.

The Chiaretto festival runs in late spring, usually late May or early June; the Festa dell'Uva e del Vino runs in early October.

The center sits at 65 meters, by the lake.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,000 a m².

What to see in Bardolino

• Chiesa di San Severo. Romanesque church built between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on the foundations of a structure mentioned in a 893 charter.
• Chiesa di San Zeno. Ninth-century church in the centro storico, one of the oldest in the province of Verona, on a Latin cross plan with a small apse.
• Centro storico. Walled medieval core around Piazza Matteotti, with arcaded streets dating to the Venetian period from the fifteenth century.

How to get to Bardolino

Bologna is about 1 h 53 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

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4. Sirmione

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 53 min from Bologna · homes €2,750 to €6,500 a m² in the center · 8,368 people

Why visit Sirmione

The peninsula runs four kilometers into the southern end of the lake, narrow enough that the old town occupies a triangle of land just over a mile long. Three low hills organize it: Cortine, San Pietro, and the rise at the tip where the Roman villa stands.

The fortress sits at the single entrance to the walled town, so the only way in by land passes through its gate, and the water it once enclosed as a fortified port is still shut in behind it. Past that gate the medieval streets are packed between the hills, and the ground rises toward the church at the highest point before falling away again toward the villa ruins at the peninsula's end.

The name attached to the villa is literary rather than archaeological: the poet's return in his thirty-first poem was to a family property on this tip of land, and nothing dug from the ground proves the two are the same place, but the name has held for a thousand years regardless. Maria Callas kept a villa here through the 1950s and 60s.

Between the enclosed water at one end and the hot spring at the other, the peninsula reads as a strip of land defined entirely by what edges it: lake on three sides, a gated approach on the fourth, and a history that settled into the name of a poem long before anyone could confirm it belonged there.

The center sits at 91 meters, by the lake.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €6,500 a m².

What to see in Sirmione

• Castello Scaligero. Fortress at the entrance to the old town, with a 37-meter keep and a fortified port still enclosing a piece of the lake.
• Grotte di Catullo. Villa complex built late first century BC to early first century AD, its ruins scattered across olive terraces at the tip of the peninsula.
• Terme di Catullo. Thermal spa drawing on the same mineral spring that surfaces offshore in Lake Garda.

How to get to Sirmione

Bologna is about 1 h 53 min away by road.

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5. Peschiera del Garda

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

1 h 46 min from Bologna · homes €2,300 to €3,500 a m² in the center · 10,899 people

Why visit Peschiera del Garda

Peschiera sits at 68 meters on the Mincio at the point where the river leaves Lake Garda, twenty-five kilometers west of Verona. The Romans called it Arilica.

The town the Republic of Venice rebuilt in 1549 was set on the medieval walls' corners, with a moat fed by the river, and the design came from Guidobaldo della Rovere before its execution on site. Austria took the town in 1815 and folded it into a wider system with Verona, Mantua and Legnago, the four together holding Lombardy-Venetia until 1866; Peschiera held the northwest corner of that arrangement, the point closest to the lake.

The fortress and the marsh settlement belong to different periods and different UNESCO listings, one Bronze Age and lakeside, one sixteenth-century and defensive, but both sit on the same stretch of water where the Mincio gathers itself before running south. The river itself is the town's organizing fact: it leaves the lake, splits into three canals to cross the walls, and rejoins below the railway bridge.

What Peschiera adds up to is a place built twice on the same threshold, where a lake becomes a river and a river becomes a border worth fortifying.

The center sits at 68 meters, by the lake.

What to see in Peschiera del Garda

• Mura veneziane. Pentagonal fortress built for Venice from 1549 to a design by Guidobaldo della Rovere, with work by Michele Sanmicheli, five bastions, a moat fed by the Mincio and three water gates.
• Canali del Mincio. Three canals cross the fortress and rejoin below the railway bridge; the central one runs through the main square inside the walls.
• Piazza Ferdinando di Savoia. Main square inside the walls, bordered by the Palazzo del Comando, the Voltoni arches over the Mincio and the Caserma Catterin.

How to get to Peschiera del Garda

It has its own railway station. Bologna is about 1 h 46 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

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6. Lonato del Garda

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

1 h 56 min from Bologna · homes €1,450 to €1,850 a m² in the center · 17,062 people

Why visit Lonato del Garda

Lonato del Garda sits on a low morainic hill on the southwestern side of Lake Garda, between Brescia and the Mincio, halfway between Milan and Venice. The castle was raised on the recognition that this rise commanded the surrounding plain, a position the wife of Bernabò Visconti judged worth fortifying.

The Venetian rectors who later governed the town from their seat below the hill were themselves administering territory for a republic that reached this far inland from the lagoon, a detail the building's later life as a private museum has mostly obscured. That seat passed in 1906 to a Brescian senator and his wife, who furnished it room by room rather than converting it into something else, which is why it now reads as a residence rather than an institution.

South of the center the ground flattens into the vineyards of the Lugana zone, the same morainic soil finishing out toward the lake's edge. The town, then, is a hill town in shape only at its summit: castle above, rectors' house and church at the level below, and the flat wine country taking over where the moraine runs out toward the water.

The center sits at 188 meters, by the lake.

The catch: It is the longest drive on this list: 1 h 56 min from Bologna.

What to see in Lonato del Garda

• Rocca di Lonato. The upper structure, the Rocchetta, stands above the lower body known as the Quartiere Principale. The walls carry later reshaping over a fortress begun in the tenth century and strengthened in 1376 on the order of Regina della Scala.
• Casa del Podestà. Rooms furnished as left by their restorer, with paintings, sculpture and majolica alongside the library, including a notable collection of incunabula.
• Duomo di San Giovanni Battista. Late Baroque collegiate church in the center, a single nave with sculpted altars and a frescoed dome.

How to get to Lonato del Garda

It has its own railway station. Bologna is about 1 h 56 min away by road. The full route from Bologna.

Everything we know about Lonato del Garda