Cinque Terre

According to legend, if you visited Italy 20 years ago, you would have never heard of a place known as Cinque Terre National Park. Then some time in the early 2000s Rick Steves mentioned it as one of his favorite little places in Italy, and the tourist revolution was invigorated. Most likely, people had been visiting, but his endorsement tends to put things over the top.

These days, it's one of THE stops on an Italian adventure. I can personally count almost a dozen people who've been there, and that's pretty weird considering it has no ancient ruins, no canals-for-streets, no Alps, and no world-renowned art.

What it does have is all the majesty of the Italian Riviera: jagged rocky coastline, incredibly steep mountainsides starting at the shore, locally produced wine, tiny villages built into the rock-faces, hiking trails, and some of the best sunsets on Earth.

Graham and I visited in late 2012 and it was the first place I've ever been where I thought "if I died right here, I think I'm at peace." Sitting atop a hundreds-of-years-old rock wall, listening to the giant waves crashing beneath me, a few meters from one of my oldest friends, watching the sun set over a bite-sized marina on the Mediterranean...pretty good.

Cinque Terre means 5 lands in Italian, so it's five towns along the coast with five slightly different cultures and settings. The results are incredible.

The sad news is that massive flooding in 2011 was so bad that it permanently altered one of the towns and eliminated the walking paths between a few of the others. Now the only hiking paths are, well, hiking paths and not walking ones. They're way up the sides of the mountains and not the leisurely strolls that folks hope/expect them to be.

Anyway, we started in the northernmost town, Monterosso al Mare, which is really two towns side-by-side. The instant you leave the train station, you're at the sea.

The only hiking trail that was manageable for a "relaxing" weekend was the one between Monterosso and Vernazza, the next town to the south. We knew the path went up a good bit and then all the way back down. We went for it.

It's hard to walk when you have all of these things to look at. It's also hard to walk when you come across a wildly talkative Minnesotan couple in their 60s who want to chat with you about everything. They were really delightful. Her name was Meredith, we decided his was probably Guy. 

As we worked up a serious sweat, we were rewarded eventually by the sight of Vernazza, and it's a hell of a sight to behold. Look at that thing! It's just nestled in to the only spot it can possibly fit. It's beautiful. It is my favorite of the five, and it was where we'd ultimately stay the night. 

In order to hike the path, you pay a small fee for a ticket which doubles as a train ticket between the five towns. Trains run almost hourly and they make things a heck of a lot easier what-with the trails being washed out. We dilly-dallied in town briefly and booked it for Riomaggiore, the southernmost town, to see the sunset. This was where Graham and I had been and I wondered if it could matchup to do this with my future bride instead of one of my best friends. 

It did.

We moved around to a spot outside of the town where some kids were swimming and some man was drying his naked body as the sun continued to fade. We took dozens of photos of the colors burning up into the clouds and of the smooth, calm water and the occasional boat or birds dotting the landscape. 

We retired back to Vernazza for some food and sleep in our delightfully inexpensive guest-house. It even had a little balcony where we ate breakfast the next morning before setting out immediately to see *everything* we could see.

We promptly went to Corniglia, the middle town, which is 400 steps up above the coastline. It's not a lot of fun to walk up there, but it's much less fun to rush down to catch a train that comes at a different time. In any case, the view from the top is well worth the steps. We trekked down to the little cove you can see at the bottom of the photo below.

In a fit of scampering around everywhere, our next stop was Manarola, which is the only one I've not mentioned yet - 2nd from the south. This is probably the most photographed of the bunch, and rightly so. We ultimately sat near the marina and had lunch with a view that looked something like this, but with nothing but sea and sun off-frame to the right.

More famously though, the town looks something like this.

Real drag, right?

Time was wearing a little thin on us, however, so we did what any sensible couple might do and we rushed back to the southernmost town, Riomaggiore, for a helping of fish and chips to go. I don't know why we thought these would be so good, but we did, and they were good enough.

With the sun fading and with our bags and train leaving from Vernazza, we hopped another train back over there to watch our 2nd sunset over the Mediterranean in as many days. This one also did not disappoint, and it gave me what might be my favorite photo of my soon-to-be-wife.

Not exactly posed, either. I mean, we both knew she was sitting there, but that's about it.

Sadly, once the sun was down (and we each took another 30-40 photos), we had to get to the train station and head back to dreary old Milan for another week or so before the next adventure.

There are only another 150 photos or so that I did not include in this post, so, you know, if you wanna see any of them, you can certainly find a way to reach me.

Up next: the cradle of western civilization as we know it...Athens, Greece.