An afternoon saunter through Lake Garda’s Salo

The sun streams through the Piazza delle Vittoria, warming our waiter as he loiters against the door frame, motionless as a cat. He has one other table of customers to attend to, and those old men sipping their grappa seem in no hurry to do anything else but talk. So we have him to ourselves, for what that’s worth. Eventually he yawns, stretches his arms, makes his way to our table, and stands before us, blinking.

It’s hopelessly early for a proper and dignified lunch, I’m sure he’s thinking, but sometimes circumstances dictate. Julie and I had left our hotel on Lake Como that morning bound for Verona. I wanted a necktie, so we planned a mid-morning stop at Salo, a resort town on the western shore of Lake Garda. I had been here before and knew the tourist trade supported several good men’s shops--and, anyway, I wanted to come back. I like to return to places I like, which is a philosophy of travel not nearly as obvious as it sounds, the lure of novelty for its own sake being insidious in an ever-widening world.

But getting here hadn’t been easy. The driving was strenuous because of the traffic that now seems to plague the two-lane roads of the Lombardy region all of the time, and finding a parking place in Salo was nearly impossible. I’d sent Julie, my fiancee, ahead on foot while I negotiated the maze of dead-ends and one-way streets that had seemed so charming when I’d walked them.

When we hit the Via Butturini, which is blocked to vehicles and set back from the lake, shops were closing. So we decided to eat. Butturini is a narrow street that angles to the left and the right block by block and stays in shadow much of the day. That keeps it comfortable during high season, but in breezy October the idea of sun entices.

So we chose the warmth of the piazza over the better restaurants toward the center of town. We liked the ambience, sitting beneath the stone columns of a public building. As we await our food, we can hear the hum of scooters a block away, but it’s a peaceful hum, a hum that sounds like Italy.

That our meal doesn’t taste like Italy is my fault. The four languages on the plastic-covered menu should have told me something, or the lack of other patrons. Our waiter remains planted in the doorway, gazing toward Lake Garda for minutes at a time, even as we gesture frantically for water. (The southern end of Lake Garda has a tranquil beauty that can be hypnotic, but he should either be immune to it by now or stay inside.)

When he finally arrives bearing food, we wish he hadn’t. Our pizza is soupy and our soup is cold, and together they cost $35. To remind myself that we are in Salo, and fortunate enough for that, I relate to Julie some of its history.

*

I tell her that an opulent, art nouveau villa gifted from Mussolini to Gabriele D’Annunzio--that elderly, one-eyed poet and patriot--is minutes away in Gardone Riviera, and that Mussolini himself lived in Salo the last year and a half of his life.

When the Allied Powers landed during the summer of 1943, Mussolini lost the government and was driven from Rome. Following Hitler’s bidding, he proclaimed himself the head of something called the Republic of Salo, and spent his days bunkered down here by the lake.

He picked Salo because, basically, it was a nice place. Lakefront villas were requisitioned for use as ministerial buildings. Years later, I stayed at one, as the Hotel Laurin. I borrowed the hotel’s kayak and paddled on Lake Garda in the shimmer of the early morning, then ate roast duck in the dining room that night. I drove out of town a few days later, bound for the Matterhorn in Switzerland. (Mussolini ended hanging upside-down from the roof of a gas station near the Swiss border.)

*

Salo remained much the same through it all. It still has a Mitteleuropean feel, as though Italian unification may not hold and it wants to hedge its bets. It caters to the Milanese businessman and Veronese wine merchants who take lakeside vacations in the summer, swimming and boating and taking twilight walks up the Via Butturini. Seeing them makes you want to throw an Armani blazer over a silk shirt and walk too.

Instead, we dedicate the afternoon to finding Mussolini’s ghosts. Never mind that we don’t speak Italian and the Via Butturini is deserted. It’s the journey that counts.

The Via Butturini is one of those marvelous small-town Italian streets that sets the humdrum shops of a neighborhood--butchers and tobacconists and boot-smiths and vegetable sellers--beside boutiques selling Missoni ties. We walk north after lunch and find the street temporarily lifeless, as vacant as an old movie set. At the Bar Batik, we see board games stacked against a wall and a soap opera heroine weeping on the television, but no patrons. We pass a scientific school named after Enrico Fermi, an Italian who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen and was building the atom bomb in Los Alamos even as Mussolini was drinking wine here with his mistress, Claretta Petacci.

Without warning, the street fills with students. They spill out of the institute and come at us in waves of threes and fours, with those bright, multicolored backpacks that are in vogue throughout Italy--most dark-haired and dark-eyed, but an occasional blond--in sneakers or rubber-soled, shiny black shoes, tramping over the cobblestones, heading home for lunch.

I notice that Butturini on this stretch has become Via Gerolano Fantoni. Italian streets do that with regularity--three millenia of history produces a lot of heroes to name streets after, though Fantoni is unknown to me--but the men’s stores are on Butturini, so we head back the other way.

We walk through the piazza, past our waiter, who is still standing in the doorway of the restaurant. The same men are still drinking grappa at their plastic table. On the right side of the street, about a block beyond, we come across a tea shop, which is decidedly odd for Italy. I count 68 teas on the menu, divided into Russian, Chinese, Ceylonese, Indian and natural essences, order a cup of No. 33 (ginseng), and wait with Julie at one of the small tables while the owner, Claudio Pace, prepares it.

Claudio looks to be in his late 50s or perhaps older, so I ask about Mussolini. No, he says, he isn’t from this area and wasn’t here then, but his wife is, and was, and she’ll be in after 3. Boxes of tea are for sale, and I promise to stop in later, talk to her and buy one, if I haven’t spent too much on the tie. The $35 soup-and-pizza lunch has made me cautious.

*

They say Mussolini made the trains run on time, but perhaps that wasn’t the difficult task we’re taught to imagine. At precisely two o’clock, the tobacconist arrives and unlocks her shop. It is the first harbinger of afternoon life, and it couldn’t have been more punctual in Frankfurt or Zurich.

We watch with amazement as the first customer arrives, and the second and third, and the fourth, fifth and sixth, all within a minute. Is this a daily routine they have exquisitely timed, or have they been watching from their windows?

Not all of Italy works this well, of course. At the newsstand next door, I notice that all the Italian papers are gone. It is the beginning of a nationwide newspaper strike that will plague us throughout our visit, since there is no other way to get radio listings or soccer scores. But I don’t understand that until I’ve visited three more newspaper stands. Then, Julie decides she wants a Diet Coke and we go looking in a bakery and a pizza place and a sundry shop. In the end, she’s no more successful than I am, even though she knows to call it “Coca Cola Light,” having spent a summer in Florence.

We end up, without Coke or a newspaper, by the lake, where we hear a man with a megaphone in a motorboat barking instructions to scullers in the water. The afternoon sun glitters off the surface and smoke rises in the hills over the other bank, toward Bardolino and the Veneto region beyond.

Our defenses down, we cross Piazza delle Vittoria and almost get run down by a woman learning how to drive. From our positions spread-eagled against the side of a nearby car, our hearts thumping at the fright, we see her through the windshield throwing up her hands and having a laugh at the near-calamity she has caused, as though it has just occured to her that the fun of driving includes scattering pedestrians in your wake.

*

Back on Via Butturini, we are pacified by our view of the sun glinting across the lake, as refracted through the glass doors at the front and back of the smart boutiques. It’s nearly five o’clock and the street is filled with dinner shoppers. A butcher’s counter, called Lucini, is three-deep. Rows of meat fill the glass case, and bottles of good Valpolicella wine, light and fruity, are stacked alongside. They cost $1.50, and I calculate that we could have skipped lunch and bought 23 of them.

There’s jazz playing in an upstairs window somewhere. We look down the street as it snakes to the left and the right and see open shutters, black, blue, green and aqua. The street numbers proceed in typical Italian fashion, with one side having nothing to do with the other, so that directly across from Lucini, at No. 40, is a store called Principe, No. 27, while the video store, which has a Forrest Gump poster with cut-out quotes tacked to the wall (Stupido e chi lo stupido fa), is No. 24 and two blocks down.

Just when I’m despairing that I won’t find a tie, I see one with silver hippos on a field of yellow. I buy it for 30,000 lire, which is about $20 and a bargain that more than makes up for lunch.

So we return down Via Butturini to the tea shop, buy Russian tea in an ornate cardboard box, and talk to Rosa, Claudio’s wife, about the Salo Republic. Our conversation is a success, sort of. She remembers seeing Mussolini in the street when she was 9 years old. He was wearing a long coat and walking with his mistress. But life for a 9-year-old was the same whether Mussolini was there or not, she reminds us, and it wasn’t too different for adults, either.

We still have an hour on the highway before Verona, so we pay our bill and walk outside. We pass the piazza and notice our waiter is no longer standing in the doorway, and I feel the loss, as though an ugly but familiar work of art has been removed.

It occurs to me that I like these Italian streets because I dislike change--which probably wasn’t too different from what Mussolini was thinking when he was here. Then I climb into our car and head up the winding road to the highway, bearing tea and a tie as talismans.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Salo by the Lake

Getting there: For airline information, see Guidebook on page L12.

From Milan, it’s 1 1/2 hours toward Venice on the A4 highway to the Brescia East exit, and half an hour more to Salo, which is a third of the way up Lake Garda’s west coast.

Where to stay: The four-star Hotel Laurin, Viale Landi 9, I25087 Salo; telephone 011-39-365-22022, fax 011-39-365-22382; $130-$160 for a double, including breakfast. A 38-room, art nouveau villa up a hill from Lake Garda that was the Mussolini-led Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the short-lived Salo Republic. Open Feb. 1-Dec. 19; includes pool and lake access.

Failing that, the four-star Duomo, Lungolago Zanandelli 91, 25087 Salo; tel. 011-39-365-21026, fax 011-39-365-21028; $100-$125 for a double, including breakfast. Open all year; 22 rooms; on the lake.

Where to eat: A good, traditional Northern Italian restaurant is the Trattoria alla Campagnola on Via Brunati 11, local tel. 365-22153, or try Laurin’s dining room, which serves fresh trout.

For more information: See Guidebook on page L12.

--B.S.