Do you know that only at Mantua, and precisely on its lakes, you can find the charming, fantastic and suggestive corner of the Far East?

In fact in the summer period, from the end of June and the beginning of September, the Upper lake is almost completely covered by a great variety of lotus flowers, they give to the place the classical appearance of the East.

From the beginning of twentieth century the “nelumbo lucifera” (lotus flower) adapted so perfectly that it represents almost a danger for the other local plants.

Everyone who sails by tourist boats (www.naviandes.com - www.motonaviandes.it - www.fiumemincio.it) or just simply goes all over its shores will find an unbreathable view with a great number of bright pink flowers from an intense and sweet perfume, they come out for over one meter from a carpet of enormous leaves. (about one meter of diameter).

Besides these wonderful flowers, you can admire other aquatic plants and not: the very beautiful white and red water lilies, yellow nannufero, the marsh hibiscus and the “water chestnut”, a typical plant from the lake of Mantua; in the fall season it ripens a fruit with a triangle shell (from which the dialect name of “trigol”), it contains an eatable pulp, after a long boiling, from the taste of a boiled chestnut. And over and inside this beautiful flora we have a great variety of fauna composed of different fishes, birds and mammals which gave to these lakes a very picturesque and romantic fairy tale image.

Swans, white, red and ashen herons, grebes, cormorants, storks and cranes, greylag geese, royal mallards, bitterns, coots and pheasants, buzzards, kites, ospreys, eagles and then badgers, foxes, hares, wild boars, weasels, beech-martens ect. are only some examples of the wonderful animals you can find in the Mantuan territory.

For view of events: www.turismo.mantova.it