Lake Garda

At the bottom of this page, under ‘Travel Help’, there’s a ‘Submit book feedback’ section. You can ask there, where the Rick Steves staff will for sure see your question.

Since Lake Garda has been a vacation destination for around 2000 years, he may not consider it "off the bath path" :-)

Personally I have loved Lake Garda since my first visit in 1966 (at 11, with my parents). I have travelld on packed tours, car trips, hotel, tent camping, mobile home camping. Mostly (90%) in and around Garda town. The last 15 years always in https://www.camping-serenella.it/en/, where we can walk to two different towns (Garda and Bardolino) and with easy access to other towns by boat.

Rick Steves covers only the areas that he likes and he believes would be most popular with North American tourists visiting Italy for the first, or maybe a second time, and that can be covered on a 3 or 4 week max trip. I guess Lake Garda does not make the cut (Lake Como or Lake Maggiore and Orta do in his opinion). There are lots of great places in Italy that he omits for that reason, but on the other hand, being Italy a country with so many great places to see, it would be impossible to cover them all in one book, unless it were a book with thousands of pages. There are other publications that cover lake Garda. Try those, or just search online. I also like Lake Garda a lot, especially the north side.