Limonaia Pra dela Fam (Lake Garda lemon house)

According to the ecomuseum, the place name Pra dela Fam ("meadow of hunger" in the Tignale dialect) comes from sixteenth-century fishermen and sailors held here for days by contrary winds, often without food. Lemons are said to have reached Lake Garda in the thirteenth century through the Franciscans of Gargnano, who had them from the Ligurian Riviera; the ecomuseum sees a trace of this in the fruit carved on the capitals of the San Francesco cloister. The lemon houses, built to shelter the trees from the cold, made the Brescian shore from Limone to Salò the northernmost commercial citrus district in the world, trading with Germany and Russia.

The official site dates the "old garden" of Pra dela Fam to 1750: three terraces still in use and five more to the north, now abandoned. Italian Wikipedia places its construction in the second half of the eighteenth century, by the Parisini family. A "new garden" was added in 1850 on the path to Tignale but was given up after a few years. The plot is flanked by two streams, the Baès and the Piovere, which supplied irrigation.

After 1861 the end of internal customs duties, competition from southern lemons, synthetic citric acid and a plant disease brought the trade down. The Gardesana road, built in the 1930s, brought tourism: the last growers sold their fruit to passers-by, tied in clusters with string and bay leaves, the picarele. The municipality of Tignale restored the site in the 1980s, in 1985 according to other sources that name the Comunità Montana Parco Alto Garda, and again in 2007 and 2016. It joined the Ecomuseo delle limonaie del Garda in 2011.

The lemon house gathers the elements shared by the Garda limonaie, which the ecomuseum site describes in detail: a massive wall set against the mountain, two side walls along the eight terraces (còle), pillars, a timber framework, sheds for the winter covering, a water tank and irrigation channels. The wall, about 50 cm thick, faces south-east to catch the winter sun; between 3 and 8 m high, it is sturdier at the front, where it carries the first row of pillars.

The pillars, of rubble stone bound with lime mortar, are 50 cm square, 1 to 2 m tall and 3 m apart. They carry heavy chestnut struts 30 to 40 cm across (sparadossi), crossed by the canter, to which the roof boards are nailed. Fir beams, the filarole, set into stone brackets, hold the boards and glazed panels on the sunny front.

The covering consists of fir boards 3 cm thick, glazed panels (envedriàe) 5 to 7 m long and 50 cm wide, whose wooden frames carry the panes, and hinged doors that can be opened to reduce humidity. Each bay generally receives 5 or 6 boards, 2 or 3 glazed panels and 2 doors, all numbered and fitted from front to back from late October by about ten people over a week. A boiler heats the interior in severe cold.

The lemon house still yields lemons, along with oranges, kumquats, mandarins and grapefruit. Two sources put the planting at about eighty trees: lemons and other citrus according to the La Melagrana cooperative, lemons, mandarins and bergamots according to the Italian botanical heritage portal. The traditional layout and an original wooden framework are kept. According to the ecomuseum the lemon trees are about forty years old and all grafted onto bitter orange, to resist the gummosis that had wiped out the original plants.

The tree's own rhythm sets the season. The first flowering, in April, is the heaviest; a more moderate one follows in June and July, then light ones in September and October. The large April-May harvest is of fruit that flowered a year earlier, rougher in skin; in June and July the best ripen, smooth and round; in August come small seedless fruits. A healthy tree gives up to 600 lemons in the strongest harvests. A small shop sells products made from the fruit, such as liqueur, syrup, jams and citrus oil.

The lemon house lies at Porto di Tignale, beside the western Gardesana road, in a cove of the lake between two tunnels, next to a beach and a bar. It opens in spring (on 27 March in 2026, according to the official site); the winter covering begins at the end of October, and the heaviest flowering comes in April. Guided visits with tasting have been organised there since 2017.

The ecomuseum extends over the whole territory of Tignale: the sanctuary of Montecastello, perched on a limestone spur above the lake, and the walking paths extend the outing. Eleven kilometres north as the crow flies, the Limonaia del Castèl in Limone allows two gardens of the same shore to be compared.