Book Sirmione tours & attraction tickets

A narrow finger of land extending three kilometres into the southern reaches of Lake Garda, Sirmione occupies one of the most dramatically positioned sites in northern Italy. The peninsula is barely wide enough in places to contain its medieval walls, its thermal springs, and the lanes that wind between them, yet it has drawn visitors since Roman times. The poet Catullus is said to have kept a villa here, and the ruins attributed to him, known as the Grotte di Catullo, remain the largest Roman residential complex in northern Italy, sitting at the peninsula's tip with views across the water to the Brescian hills. That layering of antiquity beneath a working lakeside town gives Sirmione a texture that purely resort destinations rarely achieve.

The Scaligera Castle, which guards the only land entrance to the old town, was built by the della Scala family of Verona in the thirteenth century and remains one of the best-preserved examples of Scaligero military architecture on the lake. Its towers rise directly from the water, and the small harbour it encloses still shelters boats as it did when it was a strategic naval base. Walking through the castle gate and into the medieval centre, past the thermal spa facilities fed by the sulphurous springs that bubble up from the lake bed, gives a clear sense of why the peninsula has been continuously inhabited and contested for two millennia.