The Keeper

A note on Chiara Moretti — who writes this logbook, and why.

I'm Chiara. I'm an Italian wellness journalist, thirty-eight years old, and I've been writing about thermal cultures, slow travel, and small-town Italy for about twelve years. I keep this logbook from a small stone house in Padenghe sul Garda that my grandfather bought in 1973, when the autostrada from Milan to Brescia had only just been finished and Padenghe was a place where Milanese families went for August weekends and nobody else.

I live between two places. Most of the year I'm in Milano — I have a flat in Porta Romana with my husband and our two children — and I'm in Padenghe whenever I can be. Usually that's one full week a month plus most of August and most of December. When I'm there I work from the kitchen table that has a view of two olive trees and, between them, a thin slice of the lake.

What I write about

I started writing professionally for Italian magazines in 2013 — first a wellness column for a Milanese weekly, later regular features for women's monthlies and a few travel quarterlies. Around 2020 I began writing in English as well, mostly for travel and wellness sections of British and American outlets. The Italian work pays the rent. The English work is where I get to write about my own corner of Italy for an audience that doesn't already know everything about it.

What I keep coming back to is thermal cultures — the long, peculiar, very Mediterranean tradition of taking the waters as a form of slow medicine. Italy still has roughly three hundred official spas, and a surprising number of them are not boutique luxury operations but municipal-owned facilities where the average visitor is a sixty-five-year-old retiree with a doctor's prescription. I find this interesting and I've spent a lot of time at them. Sirmione is the one closest to home.

I also write about food and wine in a small way: Lugana whites, Garda olive oil, lake fish, the ribollita-and-polenta places that aren't on Tripadvisor. None of this is fine-dining writing — I'm interested in what you eat on a Tuesday in February when nothing is staged.

Why this logbook exists

The simple answer is that I had a folder of notes that didn't fit anywhere I was already publishing. Things like: which weekday is best for the Catullo baths because the Italian school groups don't book that day. Where the Lugana growers actually pour during the spring open-cellar weekend. Which bus leaves Desenzano station in time to make the 11.15 boat to Sirmione and which one will leave you standing on the dock for forty minutes.

This is small information. None of it warrants a 1,200-word feature in a glossy magazine. All of it is the kind of thing I tell friends when they come to visit, and after about the eighth time of explaining the bus situation by text message I decided to write it down properly.

So: this is a logbook. It's not a guidebook and it's not a travel blog in the influencer sense. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored content, no brand partnerships. I don't accept hosted stays or comped meals — when I write about a hotel or a restaurant it's because I paid for it (or, if I didn't, I'll say so). The reason for those rules is not piety; it's that I want to keep being able to say what I actually think, including when what I think is "this place was overrated and I was disappointed".

How the entries are organised

The four clusters on the index — Bathing, The Shore, Slow Hours, Routes — are how I think about the place rather than how a tourism board would. Bathing is the thermal stuff: Aquaria, the Catullo baths, the Boiola spring, the long history of taking the waters around Sirmione. The Shore is the towns themselves — Sirmione, Desenzano, Padenghe, Lazise, Bardolino — and how each one feels at different times of year. Slow Hours is wine, oil, and long lunches. Routes is the practical question of how you get here and how you get around once you've arrived.

I update the logbook irregularly. I aim for one new entry every two to three weeks but some months it's more, some months it's nothing. I don't have a content schedule and I don't promote the entries on social media. If you want to know when there's something new, the simplest thing is to bookmark the index page and check it now and then.

If you want to write

I read the email I receive about the logbook but I don't always reply, especially to messages asking me to plan an itinerary. (I'm not a travel agent, and the things I'd recommend are mostly already on the site.) Corrections and gentle disagreement are welcome — I get things wrong, ferry schedules change, a restaurant I praised in October might have closed by April. If you've spotted something, I want to know.

Otherwise, thank you for reading. The southern shore of Lake Garda is a small, slow, slightly stubborn place. I hope some of these notes are useful.

— Chiara, from Padenghe sul Garda