Lago di Garda

VillaGiulia, Lago di Garda

Above Verona, left of Venice, right of Milan. Can’t miss it. Like Lugano it is almost in the Italian alps and strangely, almost tropical. The mountains are high, the lakes beneath them deep, deep. They are some awesome solar collectors, evidently. So warm that the northern most city on this Italian lake is called Limone sul Garde and yes it means "Lemon on Guard" (actually, Lemon on the lake).
This quite northern Italian town supplied most of the lemons to most of Europe for generations-before overland truck shipping of lemons from sunny Sicily eventually overtook it. The area here is famous for windsurfing. And for me getting totally lost with a rent-a-car and inching my way even deeper into the completely “Pedestrians Only” town center at full shopping rush hour in the middle of summer. Sigh. Oh, the embarrassment. Because it was Italy, it seemed I was the only one embarrassed, the natives all smiled and shrugged. Who knows what they thought.

This place is so different and so unusual, it has been determined that the people of Limone, Italy literally have different DNA code than everyone else. Shut off from the rest of the world until 50 years ago, they dated within the same limited gene pool for a couple thousand years and there was one aberration there along the line and it got multiplied and multiplied. Good aberration it turns out, those people can not have high cholesterol or die from heart attacks, things like that.

City Links:
http://www.villagiulia.it/home.html
We stayed at Villa Julia in Gargnano on the lower west side with our whole family. Loved every second of it and would go back in a heartbeat.

http://www.lagodigarda.it/
This site is not visually appealing, but selecting individual cities seems to work well.