Cinque Terre

Last weekend I went with a friend - Raimonda - to visit the Cinque Terre - 5 beautiful villages "clinging defiantly to the steep coastline west of La Spezia" to quote the Lonely Planet. The place is a UNESCO world heritage site - deservedly so. It's located on the west coast of Italy along the Riviera di Levante south east of Genova.

We wanted to stay in one of the villages but even though it was already the first weekend in Sep. there was not a room to be had. So we ended up staying in La Spezia. La Spezia's main claim to fame is its naval base built in the 1860s and its arsenal which was established there after WWII. The town has a completely different "feel" to it compared with Milan (the more I visit places here in Italy the more I come to the realization that Milan is completely different from any other place here - the other places, including Rome, have a more easy going feel to them, whereas Milan always strikes me as this very serious place, where people are busy going places, and please not to stand in their way...). Being a seaside town it's more relaxed and much more humid...

We took a B&B over there. To look at the web site of this place you'd think it's this wonderful place on the seaside (very good photography...). In fact, it's in building in a quiet square off the Via Prione, the main street of downtown La Spezia. On the left you can see what our room actually looked like. The funny thing was that we had asked for two single beds but it turned out that we got one double bed instead. It reminded me of a similar incident during my first visit to Italy, in Florence where Hagit and I ended up in a double bed with the added value of a dent in the middle so we kept rolling into each other during the night.... But the place was clean and pleasant and the owner very obliging and friendly, serving us this wonderful breakfast, telling us about his adventures and complaining about the Ligurians (La Spezia is in the Liguria and a favorite pastime of Italians is to complain about people from other regions - the owner of this B&B comes from Istria).

We took the battello (a ferry) from La Spezia to the Cinque Terre. Approaching the villages from the sea is a lovely experience. The first stop was in Porto Venere which isn't strictly part of the 5 villages making up the Cinque Terre but I found it to be the nicest (and least crowded) of the little villages we visited. I think if I go there again (or I should probably say when) I'd like to try and stay there. See below two pictures I took - one of the houses along the seashore and the other of the Chiesa di San Pietro.

We then proceeded on to visit the Cinque Terre villages. These can also be reached by train but we felt it was nicer to reach them from the sea. When the sea isn't too bumpy - I think it's the best way to see them. We hopped from village to village spending about an hour in each. and finally walked the the famous Lovers' Lane between Manarola and Riomaggiore. Well worth the trip although very very touristic.

(you can see more pictures and also those I put here - but better quality on my Flickr account)

In the food department we had focaccia (a specialty of the region) and I bought some pesto - also reputed to be the best in Italy (I tasted it on some pasta at home - excellent...). We had a lot of fish and seafood over there (obviously). The funniest experience with that being that on one occasion we ate a huge octopus complete with all its legs and head plopped onto the plate. A bit off-putting but delicious nonetheless. on the downside I tried some cod (baccala) stew which was really too fishy for me (on the left you can see me busy eating...).

The next day - which was a Sunday - it was supposed to rain. Therefore we decided (on the recommendation of our B&B owner) to go and visit the antique market in a place called Sarzana. This turned out to be a bizzare anthropological experience. We arrived there to find out that the antique market was not there and that there isn't much to do in Sarzana, especially not on Sunday morning, except maybe do some people watching. People there are very laid back and easy going and as we were sitting in the main square of this place trying to figure out what to do we saw this woman who came down from her house to talk to her friends in her nightgown.... I thought to myself that women in Milan wouldn't be caught dead in their nightgown on the street, let alone standing in a main square like that.... We promptly left Sarzana and went instead to Lerici - a pretty seaside town not far from La Spezia where we had a great lunch (as you can see in the previous picture...).

I will end this post with a picture of one of the beaches in Lerici. You can see that the chairs are organized in straight lines along the beach. People rent their place for the entire summer - and if you're in one of the back lines, that's where you'll be the entire summer.... and there's no breaking the lines and moving forward. Everyone stays in his/her chair along the lines. I'm told that in the Italian Riviera (to the west of where we were) - the lines are even straighter and order is even more strictly observed since most of the tourists there are German.... I don't think this system would work for one minute in Israel.... I'm actually amazed that it works in Italy.