Malcesine Things to Do

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The St. Stefano Church is Malcesine's main church. It lies just south of the center of town along the main north-south road. The current church was built in the 1700s, on the site of previous churches. The church is baroque in style, with some beautiful frescoes on its ceiling and numerous paintings and sculptures around its nave. It's not hug, so it doesn't take long to visit. On a hot, crowded day in Malcesine, it is a nice cool oasis of quiet.

The Scaligero Castle provides great views of Malcesine and its red rooftops. Because the town's streets are so narrow, it's hard to get a sense of the town's scale when you are walking through it. However, from the castle above the town, you get a much clearer picture. You also get a great view out across Lake Garda.

Just uphill from the center of Malcesine is an aerial tramway that takes you up Mt. Baldo for great views of Lake Garda, the mountains that surround it, and Malcesine and the other towns along the lakeshore. Make sure to go early in the day before the clouds roll in and the line gets too long. If you go in the afternoon, the wait can be an hour or more in length.

The historic central section of Malcesine is a maze of narrow and hilly streets that are packed with diners and shoppers during the day and early evening. Cars are not allowed in the area, so it is a fun area to just wander around and explore on foot. We had fun exploring the shops and checking out the cafes. The town is pretty compact, so you can easily cover it an afternoon.

There is a convenient ferry service that runs between the major towns up and down the shores of Lake Garda. If you get bored with Malcesine, you can easily escape to a number of other towns to get some variety. We took the ferry to visit two of the towns on the northern half of the lake: Limone and Riva. Limone is named after its historic lemon groves, which dominated the town's economy for centuries. Riva is a larger town at the northern end of the lake, with a nice museum and more shopping than Malcesine or Limone.

The ferry dock is about a 15 minute walk north from the center of Malcesine. We bought our tickets at the ferry dock, and did not need advanced reservations.

Malcesine's public beach lies just north of the town's signature castle. It is a pebble beach and is fairly small, but still provides what you need for a cool dip at the end of a long day of sightseeing. If you don't have beach chairs, there are some benches on the walkway right behind the beach.

About 10 meters offshore is a platform from which kids can jump into the water. Our daugter Anna had a lot of fun jumping off the platform and swimming around in the water next to it.

A highlight of our trips to the Malcesine beach was the day that a female swan and 6 of her cygnets (young swans) decided to visit the beach. They were an instant attraction, but people did a good job of keeping their distance and didn't scare them away.

The Scaligero Castle looms over the historic center of Malcesine. It sits on a hill that juts up out of Malcesine, with the lakefront side of the castle sitting atop cliffs that fall straight down to the water. The castle, which was built in the 1200s, is fairly plain, but has some interesting exhibits housed in rooms within it. One room has an exhibit about Goethe and the time that he lived in Malcesine. Another part of the castle has a small natural history exhibit, which had some good information about Lake Garda. From the castle, you can get some good views of the town and the lake.

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Your admission price includes entrance to the museums located in the castle grounds.

With my ticket I was given a plan of the castle and booklets on 2 of the temporary exhibitions, one of which was the life size concrete African icons by Sunday Jack Akpan. I'd not heard of this sculptor before, but was quite impressed by his work. The exhibition here finished in October 2007.

The Museo Castello Scaligero is permanently housed in the Venetian Palace and has exhibits of Natural History from the Lake Garda and Mont Baldo region.

The museum is surprisingly larger than I'd anticipated. Many of the articles are identified in Italian, English and German. It was also more interesting than I'd expected!

I particularly enjoyed the ethnological section, with its objects that were used in day to day life for the people living and working in the mountain and lakeside villages.