Articles · The area
Borghetto sul Mincio: the village of watermills
A handful of houses with their feet in the river, mill wheels on the walls, a six-hundred-metre bridge from the 1300s. Borghetto takes an hour to visit and years to forget — and from Beatilla you can arrive by bike.
Some places look invented for photographs; Borghetto sul Mincio has been earning them for centuries. A handful of houses built literally on the water, the wheels of medieval watermills still hanging on the facades, and the river running through the middle — road, mirror and soundtrack at once.
It is a hamlet of Valeggio sul Mincio, listed among Italy's most beautiful villages, and you can see it unhurried in an hour — which is exactly its strength. There is no route to follow, only an atmosphere: you cross it on foot, sit at a table over the water, and time does the rest.
The bridge that is a dam
Above the village runs the Visconti Bridge: six hundred metres of brick commissioned at the end of the 1300s by the lords of Milan, half bridge and half dam. Climbing it at sunset, the village below and the morainic hills around, is the best moment of the visit — and the photograph everyone takes home.
The love knot
In Borghetto and Valeggio you eat one thing, and eat it well: the Valeggio tortellino, thin pasta knotted around its filling. Legend says it recalls the knotted kerchief of two lovers on the banks of the Mincio — the «love knot» — and every restaurant in the village serves it with melted butter, as tradition demands.
Getting there from Beatilla
By car it is about twenty minutes. But the beautiful road is another one: Borghetto sits along the Mantua–Peschiera cycle path, and makes the perfect halfway stop — you arrive from the river, which is the only right way to arrive somewhere built on water.
At a glance
- What it is
- a hamlet of Valeggio sul Mincio, among Italy's most beautiful villages
- Worth seeing
- the watermills and the fourteenth-century Visconti Bridge
- Worth tasting
- the Valeggio tortellino, the «love knot»
- When
- at sunset, or on weekday mornings
- From Beatilla
- about 20 minutes by car, or by bike along the cycle path
If you have one free afternoon between Mantua and Lake Garda, it is hard to spend it better. And if you wonder how to fit it into your plans, ask us — it is our favourite job.
Sleep twenty minutes from the village on the water,
and arrive from the river, as one should.