Cinque Terre, IT

Ahhh, Cinque Terre (the Five Villages), we made our way here from Rapallo. I didn’t know what to expect, but I heard from many folks that this region was beautiful. And rightfuly so. The area was extremely mountanous and the cliffs dropped off right into the Mediterranean sea. The roads were narrow and winding, and we had a great time trying to navigate to our intended destination of Vernazza. At one point we came to an extremely scenic lookout and noticed the village of Vernazza down below us, but not before meandering through dirt roads and nearly finding ourselves on a hiking trail. Dad skillfully backed up and out of the narrow roads before we found a ‘little bit bigger’ road.

Vernazza was a tiny village. You had to park the car a kilometer away in the parking lot and then walk down to the actual village. Since we didn’t have any prior reservations, we walked along the main street and started scanning for ‘Camere’ signs.

The one major hotel with seaviews was completely booked, but we were lucky enough to step into a store full of wine, variants of olive oil, pesto and pasta, in which the owner called a friend of hers, who met us at the store, and took us to her apartment (which was nicely situated away from the crowd and at the edge closest to the road up to the parking lot). We took it, since it was at a reasonable rate and we were feeling hard pressed at finding any other open accomodations. We had a nice lunch on a restaurant patio close to the bay before boarding one of the many boats that ferried passengers to and from each of the five coastal villages.

It was around 5pm, so we thought it would be neat to go to Monterosso al Mare. It was a quick 5 minute boat ride and upon disembarking we saw a couple of little boys fishing off of the harbour’s edge.

Mom K also wanted to find a good spot to enjoy the sunset, so we parked ourselves in front of a tiny gelateria, along a street that was lined with huge canopies of flowers, and enjoyed a few cafes and gelato. We strolled around for a bit before catching our train back to Vernazza for the evening.

The following day, we wanted to make sure we explored the remaining three villages, so we first went by boat to Riomaggiore, which was much larger than Vernazza and not as charming.

We did, however, stop by at a cafe that had some wi-fi, crepes and coffee, before heading towards the next village.

We then walked along the coastline, along the Via dell’Amore, which was lined with padlocks and graffitti left behind by lovestruck couples.

This pathway was the trail that connected Riomaggiore to Manarola.   As luck would have it, we also ran into a couple from Texas, whom we had met and chatted with on our train from Ventimiglia to Milan, about 4 days prior to this random encounter.  We remembered parting jokingly saying, ‘.. .maybe we’ll see you in Cinque Terre…’, since they were heading to Venice first while we were heading up to Meina at that time.  It just goes to show you that the world is sometimes a very small place.

Further along the walkway, there was conveniently placed bar, so we stopped at for refreshments.

Once we arrived in Manarola, we walked down towards the sea, and got a pretty great lookout into the village from the cemetary, of all places.

Out of all the villages, this one looked like it had the perfect harbour to go in for a dip.  Afterwards, we caught a train to the hilltop village of Corniglia – which is the only town that you can’t get to by boat, because it sat atop a steep cliff along the coast, which made it extremely picturesque.

We were lucky enough to catch the last bus from the train station up to the village, otherwise it would have been 378 steps up.

This village was just as tiny as the others and seemed to carry a small selection of restaurants, so we settled in for dinner in a garden patio and enjoyed the cuisine and ambience, complete with two cute cats roaming around each table hoping for someone to accidently drop a crumb or two.

We had some time before our next train, so we took our time going down the 378 steps. About halfway down, we decided to break open one of the two bottles of wine we had been toting around, since we figured we still had an hour or so. We broke open the bottle, chatted for about 10 minutes and then from our lookout noticed a train slowing down and stopping at one of the platforms below us. Confused, I pulled out our copy of the train schedule, looked at the train, looked at everyone, looked at the train again and said, ‘Uh oh’. The time that I was initially looking at was for the train heading in the OPPOSITE direction. So, we hunkered down, drank some more, talked some more and 1.5 hours later, boarded the last train out of Corniglia back to our home in Vernazza.