For more than a hundred years Lake Garda was seen on a wall before it was seen from a boat. A poster in a railway station. A card sent across a border. An illustrated guide opened by someone who had not yet chosen a shore. The MAG — Museo Alto Garda, in Riva — has put that paper into one exhibition.

The title is the instruction the sheets already carried: Visitate il Garda. Grafica e promozione dalla Belle Époque al turismo moderno. It opened on Saturday 4 July 2026. It is on view until 18 October 2026. Matteo Rapanà and Anna Zunino curated it. The occasion is the centenary of the Azienda Autonoma di Soggiorno e Turismo of Riva del Garda, the body now called Garda Dolomiti.

It is the first time the museum has set posters, postcards, brochures, illustrated guides, photographs and promotional print in a single path. The holdings were built by purchase, gift, deposit, and work with collectors and other institutions. OHH! ITALY is not the organiser. The reading below follows the exhibition, not a programme we wrote.

A timetable, then a shore.

One sheet still prints the date on the journey itself: Orario 1 agosto 1912. A woman and a man in white fish from orange rock. A steamer sits on the water. The lake is already a place you could book, and a place you were asked to picture first.

Later sheets sell the same water as a Mediterranean between the Alps. Cypress, orange mountain and snow share one picture. Gardone Riviera and Fasano are named together, in German as well as in the place itself: Gardasee. The printer on the sheet is the Art Institut Orell Füssli, Zürich.

Riva is drawn as a harbour: red sails, a clock tower, the mountain behind the town. The sheet is signed Ant. Simeoni. Along the lower edge it names Edizioni Supercartello and Barabino and Graeve, Genova. Sirmione, on another sheet, is a cure rather than a castle visit. R. Ribaldi draws a woman and an amphora; the castle sits in the water; the line underneath is the treatment itself — fanghi, bagni, inalazioni. ENIT and SAIGA, formerly Barabino and Graeve, printed it.

The rooms at the MAG keep going. On one wall, Gardone Riviera is a garden figure and a lemon bough. On the next, a yellow disc and a red car: Circuito del Garda, the lake sold as speed. The graphic language changes with the travellers. Belle Époque clothes. The printed manners of the twentieth century. The car. Leisure treated as an ordinary part of life. Italy changes inside the same frame, and the public face of the lake is what those changes leave behind.

That is the useful part of the exhibition for anyone who still arrives with a poster already in mind. The shores are older than the journey, and younger than the idea of the journey. A private reading of Lake Garda starts from the water those sheets were pointing at — which shore belongs, and which can be left.