Every visitor to Sirmione's old town crosses the same drawbridge, because the Scaliger Castle sits directly across the only strip of land linking the peninsula to the mainland. Mastino I della Scala raised it in the 1250s to secure Verona's hold on Lake Garda, and its swallowtail battlements still mark the work as Ghibelline.
Behind the curtain walls is one of Italy's few surviving fortified harbors, a moated dock where the della Scala fleet once rode at anchor, screened from attack on three sides. Climb the keep's 146 steps and the lake opens out in every direction, rooftops on one side, open water on the other. The castle has never been converted into a palace or dressed up as a ruin: it still reads as the checkpoint it was built to be, right down to the drawbridge mechanism above the gate.
