Garda Community Launches Updated “Itinerari del Gusto” Food Tourism Guide

The Garda Community renews and updates the “Itinerari del Gusto” (Flavor Trails). This is indeed the title of the guide that, launched several years ago by the organization uniting the main municipalities of the Garda area, has met with great success, quickly selling out despite a very high print run.

Now the 2000 edition is released, included in the Garda Pocket series of monographic guides and presented Thursday evening by the president of the Communità Adelio Zanelli at the Spia d’Italia winery and agritourism in Lonato, which among other things is a clear example of the qualitative supremacy that now fully characterizes the basket of agri-food products of the Benacus basin.

A dominance that not many years ago played certainly a secondary role in the Garda tourist offering, being little known and also poorly promoted. Over time, however, things have changed: the needs of a still minority but undoubtedly steadily growing segment of tourists have begun to demand a comprehensive enjoyment of the territory, with culture, art, environment, and enogastronomy playing interchangeable and equally significant roles.

Evolution and features of the guide

With the first edition of the “Itinerari del Gusto,” the Garda Community anticipated this trend, which naturally was based not only on rediscovering Garda products but also on the continuous improvement in their quality, achieved by a increasingly professional and mature production sector.

The new edition of the guide, which will be printed in 50,000 copies to be distributed both in Italy and abroad, now addresses a much more consolidated territory than a few years ago: it proudly showcases the technical characteristics of the main products of the Garda area (wines, extra virgin olive oil, fish, and truffles) alongside the contact details of consortia and associations responsible for quality certification.

“But beware, this is not the usual restaurant guide,” explained President Zanelli during the presentation the other evening, “but a guide to the territories, which leaves the more attentive and curious tourist, the lover of enogastronomy and good food, the opportunity to discover the places where the lake’s flavors are best interpreted.”

At the Lonato presentation was also present Angelo Peretti, a journalist and gastronomer expert in Garda cuisine, who enriched the guide with six traditional recipes, one for each proposed itinerary (Garda Trentino, Alto Garda Bresciano, Valtenesi, Historic Hills, Middle Veronese Lake, Alto Veronese Garda, and Monte Baldo).

The result almost sounds like an invitation to rediscover an authentic and meaningful vocation of the lake, launched as a challenge not only to tourists but also to all institutions, both municipal and supra-municipal, and to operators who so far have shown more sensitivity to quantity than to that, less immediately spectacular but surely more far-sighted, of quality.