Florence to Lake Garda: Renaissance Cities and Lakeside Luxury

Most international flights arrive into Florence Airport or Pisa, both within easy reach of the city by private transfer. A driver meets you on arrival and transfers you to your accommodation in the historic centre.

Florence holds more UNESCO-listed art and architecture per square kilometre than any other city in the world. The Uffizi Gallery holds the largest collection of Italian Renaissance art in the world, with Botticelli, Raphael, and Caravaggio across rooms that the standard entry time does not allow the visitor to absorb. A private visit before the public opening gives the collection a quality of attention the standard ticket cannot.

The Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David stands at the end of a corridor lined with his unfinished Prisoners, is the other essential stop. The relationship between the finished and the unfinished within the same room is one of the more significant things to understand about Michelangelo’s working method.

The Oltrarno, Florence’s south bank neighbourhood, holds the Pitti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, and artisan workshops along Via Maggio and Piazza Santo Spirito that have been in the same families for generations. A private guide covers this in a morning at the right pace. The Oltrarno and Sant’Ambrogio areas hold the restaurants the locals use, at a distance from the tourist circuit that makes a difference to the food and the experience of eating it.

Sirmione occupies the tip of a narrow peninsula that juts four kilometres into the southern end of Lake Garda. The Castello Scaligero, a 13th-century fortress built by the Scaligeri family of Verona, guards the entrance to the old town and is one of the best-preserved medieval fortifications in northern Italy.

At the tip of the peninsula, the Grotte di Catullo are the ruins of a Roman villa covering two hectares among 1,500 olive trees above the lake. Named after the poet Catullus, who praised Sirmione in his verse, the ruins are less visited than the castle but more significant in scale, with views from the upper terraces across the lake to the Alps.

The Terme di Sirmione draws on the Fonte Boiola, a sulphurous thermal spring that emerges at 69 degrees Celsius from 20 meters below the lake bed after filtering through rock from Monte Baldo for approximately 20 years. The Aquaria spa complex uses this water in thermal pools with views across the lake. A spa afternoon on the second day provides a different kind of time on the lake from the villa visits of the first.

A private transfer connects to Verona Villafranca Airport, approximately 45 minutes from Salò by private car, for onward international flights. Milan Bergamo Airport is around 80 kilometres west and provides an alternative connection for flights to the US and UK.

The itinerary can be extended with additional nights on the lake, a connection east to Venice, or a day trip north to Riva del Garda at the lake’s northern tip.