The name Franciacorta comes from francae curtes: the rural estates that medieval monks received free of taxes, in exchange for draining and farming them. Those same hills now produce the first Italian traditional-method sparkling wine to earn DOCG status. This route of about fifty-five kilometres starts at Rovato, crosses the vineyards to the Sebino peat bogs and ends on the eastern shore of Lake Iseo, by way of the largest lake island in Italy.
Rovato stands at the southern gateway to Franciacorta, at the foot of Monte Orfano, the isolated ridge that closes the hills towards the plain. Its Monday cattle market has been held here since 1480, without a break, and it is the reason the town grew. That market also gave the town its dish: manzo all'olio, beef cooked slowly in oil and served with a sauce of dry bread and cheese, granted municipal De.Co. status in 2018. Above the houses, in a commanding position, the Monastero dell'Annunciata dates from the mid-fifteenth century, with a cloister and a double loggia looking out over the whole Brescia plain.
This is the heart of the denomination. Franciacorta DOCG covers nineteen municipalities, all in the province of Brescia, and in 1995 it became the first Italian traditional-method sparkling wine to obtain the guaranteed designation: second fermentation in the bottle, no shortcuts. Erbusco is not only cellars, though. The Romanesque parish church of Santa Maria Maggiore sits outside the village on a panoramic plateau: the core is twelfth-century, widened in 1415 with four arched bays. Nearby, Villa Lechi, a Palladian-style house built for the Martinengo family in the late sixteenth century, is the most unusual of the Franciacorta villas.
Corte Franca is a young municipality with four old souls: Borgonato, Colombaro, Nigoline and Timoline were separate villages until 1928, when a decree merged them into a single council. You can see them one after another within a few kilometres, and it is worth going slowly, because the noble houses open straight onto the road. Nigoline has Palazzo Torri and Palazzo Monti della Corte, both seventeenth-century; in the nineteenth century the first became a cultural salon known well beyond the province. Borgonato, for its part, is the village where the area's first sparkling-wine experiments were made.
The Torbiere del Sebino are some three hundred and sixty hectares of water left by peat digging, protected as a regional nature reserve since 1984. A loop trail crosses the pools on wooden boardwalks: water lilies in summer, herons and grebes all year, near silence almost everywhere. Above the reserve stands the monastery of San Pietro in Lamosa, founded in 1083 and entrusted to Cluniac monks, with fifteenth-century frescoes in the church and in the oratory. Those monks were the ones who reclaimed the francae curtes that gave Franciacorta its name: the first stop of the wine and the last of the water tell the same story.
Iseo closes Franciacorta and opens the lake. The old centre is compact, between Piazza Garibaldi and the harbour, with arcades and shops facing the water. The parish church of Sant'Andrea has a thousand-year history; set into its outer wall is the fourteenth-century tomb of Giacomo Oldofredi, who died in 1325 and was a leading figure in the town, moved here from the old cemetery in the nineteenth century. Boats for the islands leave from the promenade, along with the path that follows the Sebino northwards. On Wednesday mornings the market fills the whole harbour area.
The ferry leaves Sulzano every quarter of an hour and reaches Peschiera Maraglio in five minutes. Monte Isola is the largest lake island in Italy, four and a half square kilometres of mountain rising out of the water; private cars are banned, so you walk, cycle or use the local buses that link the villages. The climb to the sanctuary of Madonna della Ceriola, at six hundred metres on the summit, takes a good hour and pays back with a view over the whole Sebino. Peschiera still produces dried sardines, a Slow Food presidium: the fish are salted for thirty-six hours, then hung in sun and air for a month or more, strictly in winter. In June 2016 Christo laid his three kilometres of yellow walkways, The Floating Piers, right here, from 18 June to 3 July.
The last stop leaves the lake and climbs. Above Marone, at Zone, a regional reserve of about twenty-one hectares has protected the erosion pyramids since 1984: earth columns capped by a boulder that shields them from the rain, like an umbrella. The tallest is around thirty metres and carries a block four metres across. The moraine deposit they are carved from was left roughly a hundred and fifty thousand years ago by a side tongue of the Camonica glacier, and erosion keeps reshaping it: some pyramids collapse, others form, within a few decades. A marked path runs along above them, half an hour's walk.
Fifty-five kilometres are enough to go from the cellars of a traditional-method sparkling wine to the boardwalks of a peat bog, and from there to an island where you simply walk. Franciacorta works well as a weekend, but the farm stays in the hills between Rovato, Erbusco and Provaglio let you take your time: you sleep among the vines, dine on Sebino lake fish or manzo all'olio, and set off the next morning without hours of driving.
