Le tre terre

I first visited Le Cinque Terre (the five towns) in northern Italy more than a decade ago, via a day boat trip that stopped in some of them (sea swell permitting). The five towns started out as small fishing and farming villages, pretty much inaccessible by land, with records dating back around a thousand years or so. They are all quite picturesque, as suggested by the photo of Vernazza above and Le Cinque Terre is a UNESCO World Heritage site. These days, there’s a train line running through them all, and so tourism has become a big industry – perhaps too big? But they are now much more accessible and so I decided to take advantage of that to spend a weekend there, instead of popping in by boat.

I spent a day and night in Vernazza, and wandered around both Manarola and Riomaggiore the next day; hence the title of this blog, as I managed to visit only three of the five towns. (Monterosso is the only one with a beach, which didn’t interest me this time, and I’d been there previously, while Corniglia requires a big hike (uphill) from the railway station, which time did not permit). It was nice to visit in winter as most of the tourist hordes are gone, although that also meant most things were pretty quiet, with many shops and restaurants closed for their holidays.

Vernazza has a lovely harbour and pastel-coloured houses clinging to cliffs around it. There are small boats, presumably for fishing and not just for taking tourists out, close to the harbour, but not many in the water. You can also see the high hills above the town, terraced for growing grapes and other things. There is a lovely old church next to the harbour that you can see in one photo and a view from the church window in another. (Click on the photos for a better look).

Getting around Vernazza (and other towns here) involves lots and lots and lots of steps, many of them uneven – and then you have to get back down them again. A good way to get fit! I was pleased it was not raining, so all were dry. There are a couple of photos of some steps below to illustrate this. I don’t think there are any elevators (at all), so everyone needs to navigate their way up the alleyways and paths between houses. It is fairly easy to get a bit disoriented, which I succeeded in doing regularly, and happily, reminding me of Tolkien’s lovely observation that “Not all who wander are lost”.

A popular pastime (of tourists) is to walk between the towns through the hills between them, following ancient agricultural paths (that are well-defined for tourists, although some are quite challenging to traverse, I gather). Indeed, a permit to do so must be purchased and comes with instructions and help. But that required more time (and more energy) than I had to spare. You can get a bit of a sense of it with the photos below, however:

As you might expect, restaurants in Vernazza (and the rest of Le Cinque Terre) focus on seafood, and so I enjoyed some of that. The two dishes I chose below were spaghetti alla scoglia (i.e., on the rocks) and a fritto misto (mixed fried fish), both of which were delicious.

Apart from the lovely church, Vernazza has only one other ‘tourist attraction’, a term I find quite problematic, a castle high above the harbour. (The picture of the harbour taken from a high point above is in fact taken from the top of the castle, which of course I climbed). Presumably, this was part of the town’s defence in an earlier time when tourists were not the main problem, but pirates were. While not a very exciting castle, it did provide a great view. I could see the nearby rocky coves heading towards the next town, Corniglia, and also see that some of the townspeople below had a great view of the impending sunset as well with deck chairs at the ready.

Lovely views of the sunsets every evening here are renowned, so it was no surprise that locals have their deck chairs ready and that rooms for tourists with balconies are at a premium. As a person who loves sunsets, I tried hard to take a decent photo, and managed to include another photographer on the same mission in one of my attempts:

I had a delightful first day in Le Tre Terre, and the next day I moved first to Manarola via the hourly train service. In some ways, Manarola was similar to Vernazza, with houses clinging to hillsides around a harbour, and lots of signs of fishing boats (but mostly not in the water today). I enjoyed watching the seagulls lazily floating over the harbour and tried hard to photograph them, with limited success. I would have liked to see the boats being launched or retrieved down the steps and ramps of the harbour, but didn’t see any activity of that kind.

I enjoyed walking up the hills around the harbour a bit and especially enjoyed sitting in the winter sunshine for a while (trying to photograph seagulls …). There were lots of seats and benches and people enjoying them – both locals and visitors, it seemed to me. From the benches, Manarola sometimes looked as if it had skyscrapers, but of course all the houses on the hillside are relatively small. I also wandered out of sight of the town and could see the beautiful coastline beyond, including the neighbouring town of Corniglia perched on a distant hilltop and Monterosso further in the distance. I also saw a fisherman checking his pots – the only example I saw over the weekend.

Of course, many of the houses have balconies with lovely views, too, as the snapshots below make clear, and as you might expect.

I didn’t see it (because I was only there in the daytime), but Manarola has an amazing Christmas lights display on the adjacent hillside, all the work of one man, Mario Andreoli, now in his eighties, it seems. The first three photos below are taken from photos and a poster, referring to his project to decorate the hillside for the Christmas season. It all started in 1961 it seems when he lit three lights at the top of the hill (using batteries) to keep a promise made to his father. Since then, using recycled materials and lots of hard work, he has developed that promise into a work of over 300 lighted figures. I thought it fitting to include a picture of him too, to acknowledge the feats involved. The last photo shows some of the figures in the day time. Is it a tourist attraction or is it simply part of the culture of this remarkable little village? Maybe it’s now a bit of both.

Many shops (such as souvenir shops) were closed in all the towns visited – it’s mid-winter, and tourists are scarce, so people are having holidays. However, several of the shops that were open displayed lovely ceramics, such as these:

The lemons are popular images of course because they are widely grown here, and many are made into delicious limoncello (which I enjoyed last night at the restaurant in Vernazza). The pottery looked wonderful.

Finally, I moved a further stop on the train to Riomaggiore, the last in Le Cinque Terre group before La Spezia, from which I was catching my train home to Lucca via Viareggio. I found this town a little less interesting than the other two, possibly because it is closer to regular towns and people can drive to it relatively easily or maybe because it’s a bit larger? However, it had many similar features to the other two, with houses stacked on top of each other, many places with good views and of course lots and lots of steps everywhere.

Each of the towns has at least one church (with Riomaggiore having several) and many of these are quite attractive. Of course, at this time of year, each has a nativity crib. The example shown below is distinctive as the (large) crib even as some moving parts!

Travelling these days is complicated a little by the need for smartphones and in my case a preference to use a digital camera (instead of a smartphone) … all of which require batteries to be recharged regularly. By definition, a picturesque place like Le Cinque Terre is a place where one is inclined to take lots of pictures, so batteries can go flat pretty quickly if care (or restraint!) is not exercised. I have been vey lucky in recent years to have a portable recharger, courtesy of The Mathematical Association of New South Wales, which (wonderfully) charges each of my iPhone, my Android smartphone (on which was stored my train tickets) and my digital camera! Thanks MANSW!

The photos above of the marina area show boats and a boat ramp, but I didn’t see any of these in action or even any boats in the water at all. It also shows a pirate flag, a reminder of some gruesome incidents with Saracen pirates who attacked some of the towns and even took hostages for ransom many centuries ago (I think around the middle of the 16th century, but I’m not sure).

Thinking of steps, which seemed to be everywhere in Riomaggiore as well as in all the other towns, I have found Google Maps to be a bit limited, as it doesn’t seem to deal well with the many shortcuts (consisting of lots of steps) needed to get around efficiently and was frequently a bit disoriented accordingly. Riomaggiore was large enough for me to get lost in … (Local maps seem to be especially hard to interpret, too). For example, the street above, which in fact is going sharply downhill (and it felt like even more sharply – and exhaustingly – uphill in the other direction!) was described to me by Google Maps as ‘mostly flat’. Technically, I guess that’s correct, although I have usually thought of flat as horizontal; it seems that the software regards something that doesn’t have steps as mostly flat! I would call the other street (with the people basking in the glorious late afternoon sunshine) mostly flat, however, as it is mostly horizontal.

All good things come to an end, and the late afternoon sunshine quickly turned into sundown, as I left Riomaggiore to return to Lucca, my present home for most of January. Days are relatively short here at present, from about 8 am to about 5 pm. The sunset on the railway station was lovely, with a beautiful glow in the sky.